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In cluster computing, power and cooling represent a significant cost compared to the hardware itself. This is of special concern in the cloud, which provides access to large numbers of computers. We examine the use of ARM-based clusters for low-power, high performance computing. This work examines two likely use-modes: (i) a standard dedicated cluster, and (ii) a cluster of pre-configured virtual machines in the cloud. A 40-node department-level cluster based on an ARM Cortex-A9 is compared against a similar cluster based on an Intel Core2 Duo, in contrast to a recent similar study on just a 4-node cluster. For the NAS benchmarks on 32-node clusters, ARM was found to have a power efficiency ranging from 1.3 to 6.2 times greater than that of Intel. This is despite Intel's approximately five times greater performance. The particular efficiency ratio depends primarily on the size of the working set relative to L2 …