[Beowulf] The Walmart Compute Node?

Peter St. John peter.st.john at gmail.com
Thu Nov 8 11:04:31 PST 2007


Vincent,
That's tough for me to answer, presumably the 1.5 is cheaper per hertz
in power than a 3 GHz, but because of the other issues it may not be
cheaper in GFLOPS per power. No hablo EE.
Peter

On Nov 8, 2007 1:58 PM, Vincent Diepeveen <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> For a compute cluster wouldn't it be a thought to also consider the
> cost of 3 years of nonstop electricity for the amount of gflops it
> delivers?
>
> Vincent
>
>
> On Nov 8, 2007, at 6:36 PM, Peter St. John wrote:
>
> > Recently, probably you noticed, Walmart began selling a $200 linux PC.
> > (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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>
>



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