Lessons learned building a general purpose cluster for space mission applications

Over the past five years we have built and operated a computing cluster for company-wide unclassified technical and scientific computing. In this paper, we discuss our cluster architecture, some of the architectural decisions we faced in the process, a sampling of applications run by our users, and lessons learned from building and operating this cluster. We also discuss future plans to use the cluster to support continuity of technical operations and netcentricity.