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I am a broke college student and think beowulf clusters are awesome! I wish I had the money, space, time to make one. I came across this site talking about wireless clusters.
Since I will probably never get to work with them in real life, I was wondering if anybody here has had experience with them? If so, I am really jealous and I would love to hear any stories you may have.
ive never built a cluster, but ive been tempted ive got assorted computer bits scattered all over the place and should get around to connecting it all together.
Ive used a cluster for some image processing work that ive done which took about 4+hrs to complete to my laptop.
Ive also been tempted to try the bootable cluster project and take over a computer lab at night and use the bootable disks to create a cluster there.
I dont no whether you just want to get some experience at building a cluster or whether your just in it for the speed, but 486's and pent 1's can be had for pennys now a days so you could build one with them? have a look here...http://www.zorg.org/projects/cluster.shtml
i2c
Here's a good little read on what seems like a pretty good plan for a cluster. I originally saw it posted as an extra little tidbit on someone's post on here so I'm not trying to take credit for finding it.
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/beowulf/.../building.html
As i2c, said, if you can get your hands on some throw away 486's, then check out ClusterKnoppix
quote:
No cdrom drive/harddisk/floppy needed for the clients
openMosix autodiscovery - new nodes automatically join the cluster (no configuration needed)
http://bofh.be/clusterknoppix/
Yeah, I wish I could find some throw away pentium computers to use. But alas, I live in such a desolate area that there is only one used computer store near me(within 50 miles that I can know of or can find). It would be a dream come true if I could be able to get experience building one.
muert0, umm, that was a post I made. That was the site that gave me the inspiration I have now.
Thanks for the links. I will check the sites and build upon that. I have plenty of spare hardware except for old chassis, motherboards, and processors that fit the mb's. I asked the one used computer store near me about old x86's, they pretty much laughed at me. (They need to make money after all)
I knew someone had posted it as a side note. Just didn't remember who. And I thought it should be here in case someone missed it.
try ebay! www.ebay.com,
you can get pretty much anything cheap on ebay, the postage will probably work out more expensive than the actual computers.
another area to look at is thin clients, there often sold on ebay for a few dollars (that sounds so wrong, i should be using pounds), and there network enabled, not as widely documented though
a few other things you could try is emailing large local companys and say your woundering whether they have any older hardware that would otherwise go to waste as your a poor student and want to build a cluster to develop your knowledge. Try bootsales (garage sales/ yard sales?) youll find allot of people have used computer "junk" they want to get rid of. Put an advert in your local paper saying you require old computers for your...education.. and see if you have any takers, say youll take them off there hands for a small sum of money. be careful how you word it though.
Try your college or universtiy as well, my mate was going to get given 20 pent II's when his school upgraded cos he does some system admin for them but they decided to hamper his plans of building a cluster by sending them to africa to allow the kids there to surf the net and use comptuers (very good alternative i reackon).
i2c
i2c, you're a genius!!! I realized that there is a main Catipillar building in my town and they give their old computers to some store kinda' near me. A long time ago I bought a couple of 20 gig hd's from them for 20 dollars. so the computers would be cheap. You rock!
Cheers mate, PM me and let me know how you get on, id be very interested to hear
i2c