Company computer utilization?

[Lambe, Dave]

Pardon my ignorance here, BUT....

What about some type of "grid" computing similar to SETI? It would only need
a client installed that could be configured to run when the PC had been idle
for "X" minutes/hours and would SURELY be simpler to implement than
re-loading "100's of P4 and P4 Xeon boxes". The later is surely to irk
someone with stroke to get the whole project kinked.


Dave


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Hartner [mailto:hartner at cs.utah.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 11:53 AM
To: Donald Becker
Cc: Henderson, TL Todd; 'beowulf at beowulf.org'
Subject: Re: Company computer utilization?


On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Donald Becker wrote:

> > You may want to take a look at GRUB. Newer versions of GRUB can do a
> > network boot (for some subset of network cards),
> 
> Not quite.  GRUB has support for the 'netboot/etherboot' system, so the
> you must first have 'netboot' support for the network adapter you are
using.

True, there must be etherboot drivers for the network cards you are using.

GRUB does not 'support' the netboot/etherboot system, they 'incorporate'
the etherboot drivers to create their own network booting mechanism.

> [[ I don't see a compelling reason to make GRUB and netboot depend on
> each other, but... ]]

The compelling reason is that you don't have to burn a bunch of ROMs and
pop open boxes to put the ROMS in the video cards.

> > so you could just put your linux kernel and initrd our on a tftp
> > server and boot into linux without having to install anything local to
> > the PC's.
> 
> Errrm, exactly the same as having a network boot ROM.

Yes.

Mark

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