[Beowulf] noobs: what comes next?

[Jon Forrest]

Tomislav Maric wrote:

> After reading loads of info from the net, we kind of figure that we
> could read on for the rest of our lives, and still won't learn "enough".
> Time to do some work.

My suggestion to you is to forget about buying anything new
right now. Instead, find some cheap used P4 PCs with at least
1GB of RAM. In the US such things can easily be found for ~$150.
Then, try loading Rocks (www.rocksclusters.org)
and/or Perceus (www.perceus.org/portal/). This will keep
you busy for a while and will help you figure out what
you're doing. Expect to fail several times while you're
learning. This is normal.

Once you have more knowledge, and you've tried running
the actual program you want to run in the future, then
start thinking about the best hardware to get.

Cordially,
-- 
Jon Forrest
Research Computing Support
College of Chemistry
173 Tan Hall
University of California Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1460
510-643-1032
jlforrest at berkeley.edu