[Beowulf] What is a "proper" machine count for a cluster

[Mark Hahn]

> I want to initiate a project involving a beowulf cluster.   I have two 
> engineers who are VERY interested.

what kinds of things do they do?

> Anyway.   I was wondering what would be a "decent" amount of equipment to 
> start off and the preferred linux if any.

I've run full-scale cluster environments on my laptop ;)

I think I would not bother to set up anything less than 4-ish nodes.

> I was thinking 4 pentiums with dual gig processors.  Ram would be a gig or 
> more.

you probably don't mean pentiums (P5, followon from the P4, _soo_ fin de siecle)

I find that 2GB/core covers most parallel apps.  1G/core is a bit tight,
though there are a substantial number of serial apps (or embarassingly
parallel) at a measly 5-50 MB.