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<span type="cite">Gardner
Pomper wrote:</span>
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<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left: thin solid blue; padding-left: 10px; margin-left: 0pt;"><font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2">Well, at the risk of the entire
mailing list coming down on my, I must disagree with the prevailing
viewpoint.<br>
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<font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2"></font><font size="2" face="Arial,sans-serif"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">it does seem
that as soon
as someone mentions MS or somthing related to MS, most turn away...
give them some credit, they keep most idiots away from linux...</font></font><font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2"><br>
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<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left: thin solid blue; padding-left: 10px; margin-left: 0pt;"><font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2">There are huge numbers of
applications that could benefit from
parallelization at a task level. They may not be in the category of
"embarassingly" parallel, but they need significant computing resources
and they need to be solved quickly (in development time, that is). The
architecture of these is more distributed than parallel, in the classic
sense, but clusters should provide a VERY cost effective platform for
this type of computation, IF WE COULD JUST GET BACK TO THE ORIGINAL
BEOWULF CONCEPT OF COMMODITY HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. Buying 50 desktop
PCs with gigabit ethernet and 4GB of RAM for $1000 each and hooking
them all together is perfectly adequate for this type of application.
We don't need Myrinet, etc, etc. Is there a reason that a rackmount
case costs more than the PC I put in it? Must a cluster cost
$3000/node, just because I am going to run parallel software on it? <br>
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<font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2"></font><font size="2" face="Arial,sans-serif"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">indeed. the
concept of the
boewulf was concieved some time ago in the computer world, and since
then, hardware and software has moved on... but the concept still
remains the same... the most performance from the cheapest kit, which
is how the concept was come about i do believe. <br>
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<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left: thin solid blue; padding-left: 10px; margin-left: 0pt;"><font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2">This is a crying shame, because
business could really put that
computing power to use if the cost of entry was not so high. </font></blockquote>
<font face="Arial,sans-serif" size="2"></font><font size="2" face="Arial,sans-serif"><font face="Arial,sans-serif">who says it
should cost
you anything... why not start one using recyled computers that the
windows users through out because they wont run XP fast enought with
all their visual themes, and cant drop back to 9x because it's not
supported anymore... and dont think bout changing to windows classic
theme... they, mainly, are more than capible of being run as nodes in a
beowulf cluster... 2 or more of them and away you go. only thing you
have to worrie about is old PSU's being power hungry and inefficient
and dodgy caps. <br>
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<i>OK it wouldn't b ideal (meaning may b slow and not in the top 50,000
supercomputers) but it would b a start, and then after sucess with that
you can go and buy somthing usefull (with a little more umth). </i><br>
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i wouldn't say that boewulfs were high cost finatually to sart
out-in... more of high in needs of time to sit, configure and play
around with and get used to.<br>
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<span>-- <br>
matt jones,<br>
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