Our original but still operational Beowulf cluster was first brought online in April 2005. The original cluster had 48 nodes and as of April 2023 there are still 14 nodes plus the master in operation after 18 years (a June 2022 power outage killed 5 more of them.) The master itself is on UPS backup power and has been up and running continuously for over 6 years.
In comparison, each of those original nodes included dual 2GHz 64 bit AMD Opteron 246 (K8 Sledgehammer) processors (single core, no hyperthreading) and 1GB of RAM (although now several nodes have been upgraded to 2GB of RAM from the RAM of non-functional nodes.) Most people currently have a lot more computational power in their smartphones than one of these cluster nodes. Each of the new AMD powered Dell servers have more than twice the computational power than all the remaining nodes of the Beowulf cluster combined.
This cluster was built as a farm of dual socket tower servers from Aspen Systems interconnected with a standard 1Gbps ethernet switch. It is still running Fedora Core 3 with the 2.6.9 Linux kernel compiled way back in November 2004. This cluster was primarily used to run CitCom finite element analysis by students and researchers working with Professor Slava Solomatov.