Plan for determining hardware for Beowulf:

1. Plot MHz vs. cost curves for Intel PIII and AMD Athlon CPU, and determine location of the "knee" in the curves.
2. Find out from vendors if there exists an Intel PIII 800 MHz CPU with a 64 Kb L1 cache.
3. Find out from UWM group the typical array size for binary inspiral searches.
4. Purchase (or get loaners) for PIII and Athlon CPUs at knee of MHz vs. cost curves.
5. Benchmark FFTW performance for PIII and Athlon CPUs (MFlops vs. array size).
6. Benchmark FFTW performance for two CPUs (either PIII or Athlon) to get the slope relating MFlops to MHz (assumed to be linear and the same for PIII and Athlon) for the array size of interest.
7. Plot MFlops/$ vs. MHz curves for the PIII and Athlon CPUs.
8. Buy a CPU (if we don't have one already) using the results of the MFlops/$ vs. MHz curves.
9. Purchase (or get loaners) for approximately 3 motherboards for the CPU that we chose.
10. Benchmark FFTW performance for the different motherboards (MFlops vs. array size).
11. Select motherboard based on benchmarks.
12. Purchase CPU's and motherboards to begin construction of Beowulf.
13. Purchase (or get loaners) to test hard disks (40-60 Gbyte).
14. Purchase (or get loaners) to test network cards.

Results