On Sep 12, 2012, at 6:02 PM, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote: > > In short, you've shared this negative, "if it's not faster then forget > about it" sentiment before Vincent, and it's neither constructive > to the > conversation nor to be reasonably expected from Professors trying > to run > a solid class on a budget.
You total go over the line here doing this statement. You fully misunderstand normal people. 99.99% of everyone on this planet has this mentality. A raspberry pi isn't that much cheaper than a 2 socket Xeon L5420 to give an example. For $150 on ebay you get those 2 socket machines, usually in fact your own university throws them away. Couple 8 of them together and it's faster than any machine of any student at home. This for $1200 in total hardware costs. That's your typical beowulf type hardware. Commodity x64 machines, or even P3 machines, in order to do a monte carlo search faster than any single socket machine of a student can do at home (actually enough P3's easily win it from an i7 there). Dirt cheap. And it's loud, it's noisy and it draws some power. THAT is HPC. Building a beowulf using hardware that is not even representative for what got used in HPC, that is what i would find weird and not a normal type beowulf and the average human being will be total desinterested as even 64 core raspberry pi is gonna lose it from home PC's of those students. Furthermore it's total low power, it's not loud. It's kind of lego meanwhile you want to give them a HPC experience. They will guess HPC is for geeks who didn't take a bath past year, who wear woollen stockings with jerusalem sandals, in the middle of the winter, and especially don't achieve anything, as all those machines together still don't beat their windows PC. That's the average persons reaction onto your raspberry pi cluster and nothing else. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
