  Today, many scientific and engineering areas require high performance
computing to perform computationally intensive experiments. For example, many
advances in transport phenomena, thermodynamics, material properties,
computational chemistry and physics are possible only because of the
availability of such large scale computing infrastructures. Yet many challenges
are still open. The cost of energy consumption, cooling, competition for
resources have been some of the reasons why the scientific and engineering
communities are turning their interests to the possibility of implementing
energy-efficient servers utilizing low-power CPUs for computing-intensive
tasks. In this paper we introduce a novel approach, which was recently
presented at Linux Conference Europe 2015, based on the Beowulf concept and
utilizing single board computers (SBC). We present a low-energy consumption
architecture capable to tackle heavily demanding scientific computational
problems. Additionally, our goal is to provide a low cost personal solution for
scientists and engineers. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed
architecture we ran several standard benchmarking tests. Furthermore, we assess
the reliability of the machine in real life situations by performing two
benchmark tools involving practical TCAD for physicist and engineers in the
semiconductor industry.
