SBC and beowulf

[Pedro Díaz Jiménez]

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Hi Beowulf people,

Does anyone here has had experiences with SBC (single board computer) 
beowulfs?. I find it a very interesting topic in cluster building techniques,
probably worth of an article on Planet Cluster, but unfortunately I couldn't 
find a lot of info on the web except for vendors web pages and a couple of 
threads at this list archives

If anyone has had that experiences I will greatly apreciate that he/she could 
answer some questions I have in mind. I'm mainly interested in cost-efective  
(probably x86) SBC with PCI interface (if feel that VME is a little offtopic 
for a beowulf,isn't it?). The main questions I have are:

1) The majority of the products I've seen have an integrated 10/100 lan 
interface.Is posible to use the PCI bus to comunicate between SBC's in a 
same board?. What about communication between a SBC and the host computer?

2)What are the possible power supply issues involved in having, say, 4 SBC
on the same host motherboard?. In other words: does it scale well?. Special 
power supplies?

3)What about storage?. Some SBC I've seen have IDE channels, other have an 
ammount of FLASH memory 

4) Associated with question 2): Are there possible cooling problems 
associated with a SBC beowulf?

Thanks


Regards

Pedro
- -- 

  __________________________________________________
 /                                                  \
 | Pedro Diaz Jimenez                               |
 |                                                  |
 | pdiaz88 at terra.es      pdiaz at acm.asoc.fi.upm.es   |
 |                                                  |
 |                                                  |
 | http://planetcluster.org                         |
 | Clustering & H.P.C. news and documentation       |
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 | There are no stupid questions, but there're a lot|
 | of inquisitve idiots                             |
 |        Anonymous                                 |
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 |        Darth Vader, Star Wars Episode IV         |
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