Miniature Beowulf

[Zach Lowry]

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> both Compaq and Dell sell "small-form-factor" desktops, which 
> are roughly
> 12x3 in rack surface area (close to 1U, but much shallower.)
> 
> this seems fairly attractive for building clusters, since, 
> for instance,
> Compaq will preconfigure as you like (no cd, perhaps no disk, PXE
> boot on the builtin eepro100) for large orders.  3 year warantee,
> probably about 80W dissipation...
> 
Money, no money... <g>

> of course, you can do pretty much the same thing yourself 
> from commodity
> parts - AOpen has a SFF case/PS that would be reliable, and there
> are  probably uATX boards with onboard NICs that would net-boot. 
> doing it yourself would even let you go AthlonXP rather than P4.
> 
Yes! This is really cool. However, given that this will be resting in
my apartment, I'll probably go with VIA chips, for less heat and
noise. 

> these cases usually take "low-profile" PCI cards; I don't know
> whether a gigabit card would fit.  we're looking at them as 
> serial-farm components,
> so 100bT would be plenty... 
Yeah, onboard'll have to do for now. I wonder how many MicroATX
boards I can cram in a rack?

Thanks!

Zach Lowry

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