> >| Sounds pretty rad. Has anyone experimented with a bunch of old > >| clunkers in a cluster? > > > > > > > Yes. Theres an excellent Gentoo guide on that: > > http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openmosix-howto.xml > http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/diskless-howto.xml > > >Yes. It'll cost you less buying a second hand big SMP box or a > >reasonably recent not so big SMP box because of the insane power usage > >of old clunkers in a cluster. > > > > > > > And this is the reason why it stayed as that an experiment, besides the > space it occupied. > > But this one looks awesome! The "Mini-Cluster" > http://mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/ > > <quote> > At present, the idle power consumption is about 140 Watts (for 12 nodes) > with peaks estimated at around 200 Watts. The machine runs cool and > quiet. The controlling node has 256 MB RAM , and an 160 GB ATA 133 IDE > hard disk drive. The computational nodes have 256 MB RAM, each and boot > from 340 MB IBM microdrives by means of compact flash to IDE adapters. > The computational nodes mount /usr on the controlling node via NFS, for > storage and to allow for a very simple configuration. No official > benchmarks have been run, but for simple computational tasks the mini > cluster appears to be faster than four 2.4 GHz pentium 4 mcahines used > in parallel, at a fraction of the cost and power use. > </quote>
That's pretty damn cool. Do all of the CPUs have to be identical? - Grant -- [email protected] mailing list
