[Beowulf] standards for GFLOPS / power consumption measurement?

[Mark Hahn]

> How do you categorize second hand bought systems?
> I bought for 325 euro a third dual k7 mainboard + 2 processors. 

I categorize them as "not worth the bother by most professionals".
they are great if you have EP workload and a relatively supply of cheap
labor (and I don't mean that derogatorily).

dual k7's have a mostly-deserved reputation for being finicky or even
flakey, as this list has heard complaints of.  that doesn't mean they 
can't be made to do useful work!

most researchers, though, will be reluctant want to invest their own time into 
fussing with such machines since they're relatively slow and labor-intensive.

this is really the essence of Orion's appeal.  personally, I think Orion's
design is a bit imbalanced, but that just means that I'm exposed to more 
memory-intensive and tightly-coupled codes than Orion's main customers.