Well, at the risk of the entire mailing list coming down on my, I must disagree with the prevailing viewpoint.it does seem that as soon as someone mentions MS or somthing related to MS, most turn away... give them some credit, they keep most idiots away from linux...
There are huge numbers of applications that could benefit from parallelization at a task level. They may not be in the category of "embarassingly" parallel, but they need significant computing resources and they need to be solved quickly (in development time, that is). The architecture of these is more distributed than parallel, in the classic sense, but clusters should provide a VERY cost effective platform for this type of computation, IF WE COULD JUST GET BACK TO THE ORIGINAL BEOWULF CONCEPT OF COMMODITY HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. Buying 50 desktop PCs with gigabit ethernet and 4GB of RAM for $1000 each and hooking them all together is perfectly adequate for this type of application. We don't need Myrinet, etc, etc. Is there a reason that a rackmount case costs more than the PC I put in it? Must a cluster cost $3000/node, just because I am going to run parallel software on it?indeed. the concept of the boewulf was concieved some time ago in the computer world, and since then, hardware and software has moved on... but the concept still remains the same... the most performance from the cheapest kit, which is how the concept was come about i do believe.
This is a crying shame, because business could really put that computing power to use if the cost of entry was not so high.who says it should cost you anything... why not start one using recyled computers that the windows users through out because they wont run XP fast enought with all their visual themes, and cant drop back to 9x because it's not supported anymore... and dont think bout changing to windows classic theme... they, mainly, are more than capible of being run as nodes in a beowulf cluster... 2 or more of them and away you go. only thing you have to worrie about is old PSU's being power hungry and inefficient and dodgy caps.
OK it wouldn't b ideal (meaning may b slow and not in the top 50,000 supercomputers) but it would b a start, and then after sucess with that you can go and buy somthing usefull (with a little more umth).
i wouldn't say that boewulfs were high cost finatually to sart out-in... more of high in needs of time to sit, configure and play around with and get used to.
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matt jones,
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