Iranian Remote Sensing Center (IRSC) which is at the present a department of Iran Space Agency (www.iran-irsc.com), is a governmental company affiliated to the ministry of Communication and Information Technology. The most important activities of the Center consist of: Providing production and distribution of satellite data, processing these data through remote sensing technology or using latest technical and practical developments, promotion of remote sensing technology, design, construction and presentation equipments and possibilities.

In 2002, Amirkabir University of Technology signed a contract to build a PC-Cluster system for IRSC. This system consists of 8 computing nodes and one management node. We also developed parallel version of IMAPP software to be executed on this cluster. IMAPP (International MODIS/ARIS Processing Package) is a suite of programs that processes MODIS data from Level-0 to Level-1A and 1B products.

Main specifications of the system are as follows:

• Number of computing nodes: 8 (extendable)

• Type of computing processors: Pentium IV- 2.4 GHz

• Total RAM: 4 Gigabyte

• Total Hard disk capacity: 640 Gigabyte

• Internal Interconnection network: Fast Ethernet

• External Interconnection network: Gigabit Ethernet

• Network topology: Star

• Operating System: Windows 2000 Advanced Server

• Peak performance: 19.2 GFLOPS

A software package called “AkuCluster Windows” was developed to manage the cluster system. This package facilitates management, access and monitoring distributed resources of the system. Adding more, some other applied programs called “Cut PDS”, “PDS to JPG”, and “Parallel IMAPP” were produced to be executed on the system.