[Beowulf] A fairly simple question

[Mark Hahn]

> Simple solution is single pc with virtual PCs. it works properly as 

I disagree.  you can always run multiple MPI worker tasks on a single 
CPU - you won't see speedup, of course, but you can work on your programming
logic pretty reasonably.  I don't see why virtual PCs would offer any 
advantage over this.  the next step is to use a few of real PCs as RGB
suggests - not only do you start to see speedup, but you can play with 
the reasons why speedup is not perfect.  however, I think just two PCs
is a useful cluster - there's no big reason to have a separate master,
and even with 2 boxes, you can learn.