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Linux Desktop Clustering - Pick Your Pricerange

Posted by timothy on from the cheapness-rocks dept.

crashlight writes: "A Linux cluster on the desktop--Rocket Calc just announced their 8-processor "personal" cluster in a mid-tower-sized box. Starting at $4500, you get 8 Celeron 800MHz processors, each with 256MB RAM and a 100Mbps ethernet connection. The box also has an integrated 100Mbps switch. Plus it's sexy." Perhaps less sexy, but for a lot less money, you can also run a cluster of Linux (virtual) machines on your desktop on middle-of-the-road hardware. See this followup on Grant Gross's recent piece on Virtual Machines over at Newsforge.

4 of 199 comments (clear)

  1. Virtual macines??? by TheAwfulTruth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The purpose of running clusters is to increase processing power and/or fail-safety. How is running 8 virtual machines in any way a "less sexy" version of an 8 CPU cluster?

    --
    Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
    1. Re:Virtual macines??? by PD · · Score: 5, Funny

      Maybe I want to develop software for a Beowulf cluster, but either I don't have a cluster of my own, or I just want to write the software, not run it in production. Either way, a set of 8 virtual processors would be good enough for the job.

      --
      If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  2. under engineered. by azephrahel · · Score: 5, Funny


    I'm sorry, but for that price this is way under engineered. The origonal bewulf cluster was made with components on par, for the day, as the celeron modle of the redstone, for far less. If your going to spend the time and money building and marketing systems like this, they could have done a better job. They suck mobos in a big case and eth linked them togeather. Call me crazy but I think for that much money you could get a small backplane, 8 industrial PC's (powerpc/copermine/whatever on a pci card each w/its own memory) toss em in and spend the rest of your "engineering" budget, making a patch to the kernel for reliable communication over the bus, instead of slow eth connections.

    besides with the speed advantages shared memory brings to multiprocessing a quad xenon would probably outpreform this.. deffinately a quad proc ultrasparc but those are pricey even used...

    --
    You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
  3. Terrasoft, briQs, PPC, 4-8 nodes... by tcyun · · Score: 5, Informative

    I saw a quick demo of a multi-noded briQ (by Terrasoft Solutions) at SC2001 a few months ago and was very impressed. The ability to leverage the power of the PPC in vast numbers (and in a very small form factor) was incredible. I wonder how these would do in a head to head competition?

    They offer a 4-8 node tower running 500 MHz G3 or G4 CPUs and drawing "roughly 240 watts per 8 nodes (less than a dual-processor Pentium-based system)." Quite impressive.