Building a Teraflop Donated Beowulf Cluster

A number of people have written in about the new Teraflop Project aka Project Übermensch. It's an interesting idea-these folks want to get essentially the equivalent of 10757 AMD KII 350s, and turn it into a monster Beowulf cluster. In exchange for donating a machine to the project, you get a month of full bore processing power from your old machine, as well as a for-life e-mail address. They've got an address on the site to send machines to-but how often do you think one of these things is gonna break? I'd hate to sys-admin thousands of old boxen.

Comments

Re:Where are they going to put this thing?

[drudd]

To be more efficient they'd probably have to have multiple layers of clustering, i.e. have a gigantic Beowolf cluster which is made up of smaller Beowolf clusters.

Assuming they can get the networking and power resources and have the warehouse necessary to house all of these computers, there's very little you can actually do in such a massively parallel system. The hardest part would be simply feeding it enough data to keep all the nodes processing concurrently.

A much more efficient use of such massive resources would be to split them into smaller clusters of 50-100 computers in size, and allocate time individually. Then when a really large project comes along you can merge a few of the smaller clusters together.

IMHO, if this project is for real, it's still a pretty shabby deal. Granted that old 386 box you have is pretty near worthless in today's sub $500 market, but email addresses are cheap too. Donate that box to Goodwill and give some poor child the chance to familiarize himself with the technology necessary to succeed in the next millennium.

Doug