利用傳統電腦來解決複雜的科學及工程問題已不敷使用，唯有藉助平行處理的方式才能達到此一目的。最近，運用叢集式電腦系統搭配Linux作業系統與PVM或MPI訊息傳遞程式庫，來執行高速計算(或平行計算)已經逐漸走到實際可行的階段。即使用者可以花較少的費用與時間就能建置叢集式的平行電腦系統，將平行計算應用到其專業領域，而得到不錯的結果。本論文陳述本實驗室所建構的一套以18台對稱式多處理機系統(36顆處理器)的個人電腦叢集，並簡介叢集式平行系統架構，軟體工具以及相關應用。

To use supercomputer for high-performance computing has been growing. Supercomputers that are single big expensive machines with a shared memory and one or more processors meet the professional need. A large-scale processing and storage system that provides high bandwidth at low cost is then their expectation. A cluster is a collection of independent and cheap machines, used together as a supercomputer to provide a solution. In this paper, a SMP-based PC cluster (36 processors), called THPTB (TungHai Parallel TestBed) with channel bonded technique, was proposed and built in CSIE. The system architecture and benchmark performances of the cluster are also presented in this paper. To take advantage of the parallelism of the SMPs cluster systems by using message-passing libraries, the HPL benchmark is used to demonstrate the performance. The experimental results show that our cluster can obtain 17.38 GFlops/s with channel bonding, when the total number of processor used is 36.