> (is a cluster of Arduinos a Beowulf? It's commodity hardware running open > source software using commodity non-proprietary interconnects. I think so..
only in a loose interpretation. to my mind, beowulf is about repurposing (hacking in the classic sense). yes, off-the-shelf components, but used to do something that would be a big disadvantage (cost) to do by the more conventional route. an arduino cluster can only be an educational thing - not worthless, but not practical problem-solving. you could achieve the same inherently terrible performance by wiring up some VMs on your laptop. in this sense, a cluster of PS3s was far more interesting, though basically doomed from the start. if you could somehow add a gtx650 ti boost card onto each arduino, it could be quite interesting: you'd be using the arduino to solve a real problem (how to minimize the overhead associated with GPGPU). >>> I am a BIG believer in personal computing? >> >> s/personal computing/personal supercomputing/ I'm not. if it's super (by today's standards), it should probably not be personal, since that implies that it won't be kept busy. (yes, some people can keep even a super busy, but reality is that most people are bursty in their compute consumption. using your gpu for gpgpu is not "personal supercomputing" because it's not super: you are only able do consider doing that because the price is so non-super. OTOH if you have 8x K20's in your desktop, that's fairly super, and I would claim that few people could keep that $30k busy - for those who can, it's just "workstation" not "personal super". I guess that's what has always peeved me about "personal super" - it sounds like bragging: like saying "I can spend 6 digits on "super" hardware and let it sit idle".) on the original topic, "cheap open learning clusters" to me sounds like a great application for EC2 or similar IaaS. that is, it's already available. _______________________________________________ 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
