Sun Donation Spurs Linux Cluster at Purdue

An anonymous reader writes "Purdue University, with a $3.6 million gift from Sun Microsystems, is giving recycled PCs new life as a computer cluster that makes high-performance computing power available in undergraduate classes. 'Previously, my students could only do what I'd describe as 'proof' animations - small, low-resolution and not presentation quality,' [Professor Richard] Paul said. 'With access to this computing power, the students will be able to ship their software files of instructions to the Linux cluster, and it will come back in three or four hours with modeling, lighting and animation. Students will get to experience the whole thing in terms of scale and presence, and they can do longer animations.' More images of the current Linux cluster and other servers at Purdue are out there."

Comments

Linux Cluster

[skidmark515]

I am working on my own Linux Cluster. Our website is: http://www.geocities.com/cluster_linux/ We need donations.

who's the weirdo

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the freakiest looking dude I have ever seen.

Re:great

[NeoAndTrinityDieInRe]

I had to shield my son's eyes.

Re:Electrical costs make this a White elephant gif

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent points! In addition to the hardware, the G5 supercluster runs a Professionally Developed operating system. That's something these linux-based clusters cannot claim, with their amateur programmers. With Mac OS X, a student can get actual work done rather than spending 4 hours a day recompiling their kernel and whatnot. Apple makes real products for real professionals. Sure you can use Linux if you have hundreds of extra hours to spare endlessly configuring and reconfiguring computers, but unless you have no other choice, you would have to be an idiot (or perhaps a loser who lives in his mothers basement) to pick linux.