[asitkm]

Hi Guys,
this is my first post and instead of saying hello I am asking for help, so selfish of me
We are setting up a CFD laboratory in our mechanical engineering department. So I would appreciate any generic advice on the topic and specifically regarding the PC and server configurations, the operating system and any relevant freeware (say like Octave).
We are planning to go for a total of 36 machines with one of them acting as the dedicated server for Ansys 12.0 and MATLAB. So, the other 35 machines would be only running the client installations.
We currently have licenses for MATLAB, Solidworks, Ansys 12.0 (20 academic and 5 commercial)
As far as the OS goes, I am myself partial to Linux (Ubuntu rocks ) but all the licenses we have are for Windows machines. Still, could anyone advise me if it would be better to go with Linux on say 5-10 machines for creating a computation cluster. Any advice on how to create and use a cluster would be valuable to me considering I am a novice at it. (I will look over the dedicated Hardware discussion forum to, but just had to post this query here for a wider audience)
Thank you,
a.