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iMac Beowulf Cluster Comes to Life

Posted by timothy on from the taste-the-rainbow dept.

AmigaAvenger writes "Finally a good use for all those old IMacs that many organizations have laying around collecting dust. We have set up a 5 node (4+1 controller) iMac beowulf cluster, which is appropriately named Skittles, and is running PPC Yellowdog Linux, with MPICH 1.2.6 cluster message passing software."

1 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Isn't this somewhat unneccessary? by Digital+Pizza · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is obviously just a short-term toy project - I doubt they're serious about doing any real work on this. I mean, a 10-megabit hub?

    The power draw would be a problem too. I used to have an iMac DV, and even with the screen in "energy-save" mode, there was still a bit of power being drawn by the tube and accompanying electronics.

    The best old Mac for clustering would be, IMHO, the Gigabit Ethernet G4. They must be fairly cheap by now, have Gigabit Ethernet (duh), take two gigabytes of RAM, and are easily processor-upgradeable if desired (G4 upgrades are getting cheap).

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