undergrad senior project idea, help

[Dean Johnson]

On Tue, 2002-09-03 at 23:50, Matt Osborne wrote:
> Thank you all for the input! Another question though.. is there any kind
> of minimum requirement level for hardware? I picked up a copy of the MIT
> Press Beowulf Cluster Comp. w/Linux which uses an example node of
> Athlon 1GHz. Well with me coming from a small private school w/very
> limited budget I think I'm looking at Pent. 2's at best.. but then again
> I could always include it somewhere in my cost analysis that this is what
> you get with P2's and this is what you might get if you used PC's with
> more expensive processors..
> 

In many respects it doesn't matter what nodes you use, it just
determines how long it will take to get stuff done. I usually promote
the idea of buying the best that you can at the point you are buying,
but stay one step back from the bleeding edge. Another thing to consider
is the characteristics of the application that you are going to be
running. For instance, does it consider that each node is roughly
equivalent and doles out work to be done in identically sized pieces.
When this is the case you get into problems where slower nodes will
seriously impact the overall performance because the sibling faster
nodes are sitting around doing nothing for much of the time.

	-Dean