[Beowulf] The Walmart Compute Node?

[Vincent Diepeveen]

You're right, a lot of those 'clusters' are just theoretic clusters.  
Those who are number crunching wouldn't ever think of buying  
something else than quad cores as of now.

About some remark someone made that the c7 also supports encryption  
bla bla, you gotta be careful there. For fun i had installed  
bitlocker at a quadcore AMD numbercrunching machine, and the machine  
is broken now, just after a few months.

Now of course i'm gonna get a lecture of RGB about why windoze sucks  
even more than its blowup rate indicates and he'd be right about it  
then,
yet my important remark here is that dropping a few things like sha1  
etc is total useless, as when number crunching then encryption is a  
thing you want to avoid at all costs.

For ISPs who want to encrypt at tcp/ip level i bet we aren't gonna  
get any public info from them what their concerns is; i'd rather  
guess that they all go for intel mobile cpu's anyway, lower power  
states there definitely is important; it's only about power there.

Vincent

On Nov 8, 2007, at 10:03 PM, andrew holway wrote:

> Im still not convinced, bang for buck your going to get more
> clustering this junk than buying commodity hardware. Benchmarks at the
> ready.
>
> Andy
>
> On 08/11/2007, Jim Lux <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>> At 09:36 AM 11/8/2007, Peter St. John wrote:
>>> Recently, probably you noticed, Walmart began selling a $200  
>>> linux PC.
>>
>> See, e.g., http://home.earthlink.net/~jimlux/beowulf/walmart.htm  
>> from 2002
>>
>>
>>
>>> (Apparently the OS is just Ubuntu 7.10 with a small xindow manager
>>> instead of Gnome or KDE). Now Slashdot points to
>>> http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5305482907.html, the MB being  
>>> sold
>>> separately for $60 ("development board"). It has 1.5GHz CPU,
>>> unpopulated memory (slots for 2GB), one 10/100 connection. Does this
>>> look to y'all like fair FLOPS/$ for a kitchen project? I'm  
>>> thinking 6
>>> of them as compute nodes per 8 port router, with a bigger head node
>>> for fileserving. (actually I'll use a spare room but you know what I
>>> mean). An arrangement like this might be faster RAM access per core,
>>> compared to multicore, since each core has no competition for  
>>> is't own
>>> memory, right?
>>> Thanks,
>>> Peter
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
>>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
>>> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
>> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit  
>> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit  
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>