Iofor was our first Beowulf cluster. It was constructed in early 1998 from 8 second-hand 486 PCs, and was very cheap to build (around $500). It was used as an experimental system for testing and evaluating Beowulf hardware and software. It served as a useful prototype for helping with the concept, design and proposal for Perseus, our first production system.
Iofor was also used for research and software development in a variety of areas including parallel I/O, data tiling, cluster management, job scheduling, and parallel programming.
The cluster was named after Iofor (sometimes translated as Eofor), a character featured in the Beowulf epic poem. The name also reflects some of the work that was done on the cluster to study parallel I/O and High Performance Fortran on Beowulf systems.
Iofor was decommissioned in March 2000.