[Beowulf] The Walmart Compute Node?

[Jim Lux]

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
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