[wplug] Building a beowulf (was: ideas for the new year)

[David Gerard Matthews Jr.]

The webfarm idea sounds cool to me.  I don't think the idea was ever
Beowulf-specific; it was more like "let's build a cluster", and Beowulf
was the first thing that came to mind.  I think the plan was to do it
for bragging rights, though, because I'm pretty sure we would have to
tear it down at the end of the day.
-dgm


James O'Kane wrote:
> 
> I'm a bit behind on my wplug mail, but the first question you need to ask
> yourself before starting to build this is:
> 
> Why?
> 
> If you just want to be able to brag about having built one, then as long
> as you acknowledge that before you start you'll do okay.
> I started to build a cluster in my apartment once. My thought was I could
> let people use it for free, but then I realized that most people who have
> a use for one can get funding to build one better than what I was putting
> together.
> 
> A slightly related project that would have much more practical
> applications would be to build a webfarm. I've done this on a 3 machine
> scale to see how it worked. There is software for the 2.2 and 2.4 kernel
> that will do load balancing over several machines. With this software the
> architecture of the server doesn't matter. We could take all of these IPX
> machines and see what kind of performance we can get out of them compared
> to a single PIII/Athlon.
> 
> -james
> 
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