I worked on a Wolfpack (early version of Microsoft clustering) cluster a couple of years ago. Wolfpack clusters were limited to 2 nodes at the time, working as peers. Last time I looked, MS was currently working with 4 nodes, and hoping to reach 16 eventually. They were architected to handle failover and redundancy issues, but not compute intensive problems. (And early versions were not very robust, but I hear that has gotten better.)
Beowulf clusters run with up to thousands of nodes; for compute intensive problems, that would certainly be the choice I'd make. The cost savings re: licenses and reuse of older hardware are bonus items.
All valid points. The fuel to reach L4 or L5 (the Trojan Lagrange points) is nearly enough to escape the Earth-Moon's vicinity entirely.
One other consideration: L4 and L5 are stable as long as you omit perturbations from the planets. But the gravitational perturbations from Venus and Jupiter are strong enough that even at the Earth-Moon (Trojan) Lagrange points, the spacecraft will require maneuvers to remain "in place." These maneuvers are much smaller than the typical stationkeeping maneuvers, but not negligible. That's why there isn't an accumulation of space debris at the Earth-Moon Trojan points.
The orbit maneuvers required to maintain the spacecraft's orbit are relatively cheap when compared to the maneuver required to place it in orbit around the sun. You'd need to boost the spacecraft's velocity by ~3.5 km/s to leave Earth orbit, as compared to maintenance maneuvers on the order of a m/s. So EUVE doesn't have the fuel to leave Earth orbit.
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I worked on a Wolfpack (early version of Microsoft clustering) cluster a couple of years ago. Wolfpack clusters were limited to 2 nodes at the time, working as peers. Last time I looked, MS was currently working with 4 nodes, and hoping to reach 16 eventually. They were architected to handle failover and redundancy issues, but not compute intensive problems. (And early versions were not very robust, but I hear that has gotten better.)
Beowulf clusters run with up to thousands of nodes; for compute intensive problems, that would certainly be the choice I'd make. The cost savings re: licenses and reuse of older hardware are bonus items.
All valid points. The fuel to reach L4 or L5 (the Trojan Lagrange points) is nearly enough to escape the Earth-Moon's vicinity entirely. One other consideration: L4 and L5 are stable as long as you omit perturbations from the planets. But the gravitational perturbations from Venus and Jupiter are strong enough that even at the Earth-Moon (Trojan) Lagrange points, the spacecraft will require maneuvers to remain "in place." These maneuvers are much smaller than the typical stationkeeping maneuvers, but not negligible. That's why there isn't an accumulation of space debris at the Earth-Moon Trojan points.
The orbit maneuvers required to maintain the spacecraft's orbit are relatively cheap when compared to the maneuver required to place it in orbit around the sun. You'd need to boost the spacecraft's velocity by ~3.5 km/s to leave Earth orbit, as compared to maintenance maneuvers on the order of a m/s. So EUVE doesn't have the fuel to leave Earth orbit.