The majority of HPC resources are organized in clusters of machines. These machines are based on the same type of technology that you can find in your desktop or laptop PC, but have more powerful CPUs, more RAM, and a faster network than you would normally find in a consumer level machine. In addition to the hardware, the clusters run software that manages the computational jobs - making sure that the load is distributed over the machines and so ensuring that jobs run quicker. Finally, scientific and engineering software is pre-installed on the systems so you can just run your problems.
Grid Feup cluster was funded and by a consortium of interested parties who have heavy computational requirements, the members of the consortium are as follows: