In the Land of the Dinosaurs,How to Survive Experience with Building of Midrange Computing Cluster

This paper discusses how to put into operation a midrange computing cluster for the Nuclear Chemistry Group(NCG) of the State University of New York at STONY Brook(SUNY-SB).The NCG is part and one of the collaborators within the RHIC/Phenix experiment located at the Brookhaven National Laboratory(BNL).The Phenix detector system produces about half a PB(or 500 TB) of data a year and our goal was to provide to this remote collaborating facility the means to be part of the analysis process.The computing installation was put into operation at the beginning of the year 2000.The cluster consists of 32 peripheral machines running under Linux and central server Alpha 4100 under DIgital Unix 4.of (formally True Unix 64),In the paper the realization process is under discussion.