[K12OSN] A Beowulf server for K12LTSP?

Rob Owens hick518 at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 10 11:37:03 UTC 2005


I don't know the answer to your question, but make
sure you consider the space issue.  Clustering enough
of these machines together might take up almost a
whole room...

-Rob

--- Henry Hartley <henryhartley at westat.com> wrote:

> 
> This is a bit of an odd question, perhaps, but the
> company I work for in
> my day job is surplussing a bunch of old Dell 566MHz
> Celeron computers
> (128MB RAM, 10MB drives).  I know they'd make
> perfectly nice client
> machines but that's not usually the bottleneck. 
> There are lots of
> machines of this class, or even PIIs) to be had,
> particularly in this
> area (Maryland suburbs of Washington DC).  The thing
> that actually costs
> money is the server.
> 
> So, a thought occurred to me when I saw three stacks
> of about 25 of
> these machines each.  Could you build a Beowulf
> machine out of these old
> machines to act as server?  I suppose you'd still
> want to invest in some
> hard drives and build a RAID array of some sort but
> would the combined
> memory and processors be able to take the place of a
> server?  Would it
> take too many machines to be worthwhile?  Like 50
> machines to run a 25
> client lab - not counting client machines?  On the
> other hand, they are
> essentially free.  Of course, there's always the
> power consumption to be
> considered.  
> 
> Or is this a stupid idea.
> 
> -- 
> Henry Hartley
> 
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