Slashdot Mirror
Junk Super Computer Assimilates All
VonGuard writes "The ACCRC is the relatively famous computer recycling non-profit in Berkeley that builds clusters out of old hardware. Make Blog has an article about the Center's plans to build a cluster out of the equipment people bring to recycle at Make Faire later this month. The ACCRC geeks are now able to integrate PII's or better into the cluster, which will be powered by Vegetable Oil and run Parallel Knoppix."
Hmm... they tried this piecemeal supercomputer at my university (university of san francisco). From what I understood, they accepted a lot of low-spec computers that actually caused more problems than they served to compute. http://www.flashmobcomputing.org/ Can anyone confirm on my specific point?
... the old Stone Soup Supercomputer was the first I can remember that used cast-off computers to generate (what passed for) Serious Horsepower. Tempus fugit, indeed.
I got excited about cluster computing a couple years back. I spent about $600 on parts for a 12-node Pentium II cluster, then spent 3 weeks setting it all up. I then spent another 6 weeks with a comp sci professor trying to reverse-engineer the Folding at Home client to parallelize the data units. (Psst...don't tell Vijay!) Our solution was to use the F@H client as-is, and to network the nodes as additional drives and run a client with a different machine ID on each drive.
As it turned out, a single 1.1GHz P3 was doing more folding than 12 350MHz P2's working in parallel. I scrapped the cluster and sold the parts on eBay. My electricity bill dropped about $100 a month afterwards. Again, I wish them luck.
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.