Flipper was a so called Beowulf Cluster, basically 'a-pile-of-PC's'. It was built as part of a master thesis by Fredrik Augustsson summer/fall 2000 with Åke Sandgren and Björn Torkelsson as supervisors.
 

Flipper consists of 9 dual Intel Pentium III 550 MHz processors. The nodes are connected with a switchless high capacity network from Dolphin ICS. For maintenance the cluster is also connected with fast Ethernet.

The cluster is set up in a 2x4 grid with a Control Work Station that is connected to the 8 nodes via a 100Mbit ethernet switch. The CWS is used as a login and development node for users, and as an administration node for the system administrators.

Flipper is mainly intended to be an experimental cluster, hence the setup of the cluster may change rapidly, but for the moment four of the nodes are running a batch system, while the other four nodes are set aside for interactive use.

Some benchmarks from Flipper. (here)

See also the press release (in Swedish) for some more information about Flipper. If you have any questions about Flipper please send a mail to: support@hpc2n.umu.se