Beowulf - Single Board Computers? (long)

[Bob Drzyzgula]

On Mon, Sep 21, 1998 at 10:57:37AM -0400, Douglas Eadline wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Sep 1998, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> 
> 1) There is trade-off between commodity price and compact packaging.
>    Compact packaging is not an issue for the masses. Therefore,
>    any compact packaging is going to increase the price of a system
>    and "move it away" from a commodity base.  Using commodity
>    components means that the latest and greatest are readily
>    available, but it is also the "lego" we get to play
>    with.  The low prices for commodity clusters are due to
>    using "commodity lego".  If we have to start designing 
>    our own lego pieces, then the price goes up.

I would tend to agree, except to the extent that we could
happen to take advantage of the volume production of
something like $500 Christmas-time special Pentium II
home systems; not that we would buy the things direct from
WalMart and strip them down, more like that we could find the
factories making these and get them to make us a production
run of the system boards sans the radio tuners.  As computers
move more into the brutal consumer electronics industry, stuff
like this is likly to start being possible.

> 2) I am sure that we (and others) will develop more dense
>    packaging schemes, however, the volumes need to be there 
>    to provide a lower cost.  In addition, keep in mind that
>    selling and supporting a unique packaging system also
>    requires the vendor (if they do not want to get run out of
>    town) to be able to support such a product - which in turn
>    means the vendor has to design and test such a product -
>    which takes time and money...  

Well, yes... this is kind of what I was speaking of, although
I may not have done a good job of sticking to the future tense
in what I wrote. My point was to attempt to identify possible
starting points for this kind of product development. Clearly
one could start with a stock SBC, and if it sold like hotcakes
maybe have the funds and the confidence to develop a more
custom system using parts that are specifically designed for
the job. Sort of what Exabyte did with 8mm Video cameras.
Although I would hope the prices of a tiny Beowulf compute
node would fall faster than Exabyte's prices did...

--Bob

-- 
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Bob Drzyzgula                             It's not a problem
bob@drzyzgula.org                until something bad happens
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