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Mini-ITX Clustering

Posted by michael on from the there's-no-i-in-team dept.

NormalVisual writes "Add this cluster to the list of fun stuff you can do with those tiny little Mini-ITX motherboards. I especially like the bit about the peak 200W power dissipation. Look Ma, no fans!! You may now begin with the obligatory Beowulf comments...."

3 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Floating point performance by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not to mention that mini-ITX is VIA-proprietary technology. At least, I think it is.

    And VIA markets their own line of CPUs for use in that scenario.

    However, I wouldn't mind seeing Pentium-M or mobile Athlons placed on mini-ITX boards.

    --
    tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
  2. Massively Parallel by Seanasy · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I built a Mini-ITX based massively parallel cluster named PROTEUS. I have 12 nodes using VIA EPIA V8000, 800 MHz motherboards.

    I'd just like to point out that 12 nodes is not "massively parallel."

  3. Re:Floating point performance by QuantumFTL · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The floating point is just a convenience. Almost any algorithm can be modified to work with fixed point precision -- and without loss of performance.

    Apparently you've never done any numerical computing, especially of the scientific variety. In an astrophysics simulation, for instance, the density of a field may span over 20 orders of magnitude, hardly reasonable to do with fixed point arithmetic.

    Not to mention that many iterative algorithms can oscillate wildly in the presence of numerical error.

    It is true that there are many other uses for a cluster besides numerical computing, however the idea that any floating point algorithm can be converted to fixed point could not be more wrong.

    Disclaimer: My research at Cornell University is high performance clustered numerical computing.

    Cheers,
    Justin