Beowulf - Single Board Computers?

[Walter B. Ligon III]

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At one time the GSFC guys and I were planning to build a beowulf from
laptops - the code name was "lap-dog."  I decided we could use a wireless
network adapter, put the nodes in a large box and put the box in front of
a tornado - we would have the first tornado-born parallel computer.  It could
process data on the structure of the tornado real-time.  There are many
interesting problems - for example the topology is always changing, and
nodes are always going offline.  I never could figure out hot to get the
processors airborn, the little fins from the movie never really worked out
in practice.  Its alway's something.

Anyway, we didn't build lap-dog, instead we built grendel (our first
beowulf machine).  I still think one could build a rather compact machine
from laptops with the display removed (or laptop motherboards).  I have
seen such a thing at a conference, but they were trying to bill it as
"portable."  Its not - the network cards suck more juice than your average
battery wants to supply for a long time.

Walt

-- 
Dr. Walter B. Ligon III
Associate Professor
ECE Department
Clemson University