Need advice on cluster hardware

[Ron Choy]

Hi,

My advisor has made me responsible (*gasp*) for purchasing a 8 node 
cluster, used mainly for computational linear algebra problems.  After some 
research I came up with the following configuration:

Frontend (+file server):
Asus A7M266-D (AMD 760MPX)		
Enermax EG365P-VE 350W PS (meets the 15A on 12V requirement of the board)
2 x Athlon MP 1800+ (1.533GHz)		
2 x Thermaltake VOLCANO 6Cu+ heatsink
2 x Kingston PC2100 512MB ECC Registered	
IBM SCSI HD 36GB 10000RPM
Adaptec SCSI Controller	
2 x Netgear GA622T gigabit nic
ATI xpert Rage XL 8MB AGP vid		
Floppy drive
Sony 52X cdrom drive
Tower case

Compute nodes:
same as front end, minus 1 nic and SCSI adapter, and replace SCSI HD with 
IDE HD.

Switch:
Intel 410T 16 port 10/100 switch

(* The reason why I have gigabit nics and 10/100 switch is that I don't 
know if bandwidth is going to be a limit on the computations so I would 
rather start out small and expand later.  (is this a good idea?) )



Does this configuration looks reasonable?  Any known conflicts and driver 
issues?  I am going to use the 2.4.x kernel.


Thanks!

Ron Choy
MIT LCS, Supercomputing technologies group