Simple Analyzing program

[mogema at stonemedia.com]

Hello,

          I am 15 years old, in high school, and fascinated with
beowulfs, yet know nothing about them except what they are and how they
work. I have had no experience with beowulfs before, but have much
experience with Linux and the networking techniques needed for such
things as beowulfs. My networking knowledge comes from my CCNA I just
recently received through the local community college. My Linux
knowledge comes from the vast piles of Unix/Linux books spread across my
desk, as well as years of tinkering and learning, and setting up several
Linux shell and web server for the company I own/operate out of Austin,
Texas, USA.



          Recently, I decided to make a small 5 node cluster for my
Science Fair project, and I am in need of alot of guidance. First off, I
need some software that would need to do two simple things. 1) Be able
to run across a Beowulf and on a single computer, and 2) Show the
immense processing capabilities of Beowulf versus a single computer. If
anyone is familiar with Seti at Home, or DNETC, I was thinking of a
modified version of something along those lines, that, on the Beowulf,
would run across the network and send its statistics to a proxy node,
that would display the overall results of all the nodes combined. Then,
for the "antagonist" part of the science fair project, run the same
program on a single computer, to show how a Beowulf can improve
performance, at a semi affordable rate, to applications as simple as web
servers, to as big as database processing.



          As of right now, I am still working on getting enough
equipment for the project. I am soon going to be contacting companies
such as Dell, Cisco, and 3Com, to see if they may have any student
programs I could become involved with to somehow get the equipment
through donations or through a lease / borrow of some sort. If anyone
knows of any organization / company / person that may be able to
financially help would be greatly appreciated, as well as any other
comments or suggestions.



          The applications I mentioned earlier, Seti and Dnetc, I just
realized, in the context of how I envisioned it being set up, would not
be true parallel processing, would it? Not all nodes are working
together as one "supercomputer", instead they each operate on their own
and tell a "master node" how they are coming along and that master node
just takes all the statistics, adds them up, and makes it seems like one
large multi-node computer. ... Or should I go get another Pepsi for more
caffeine so I can actually understand what I just wrote..



          Well, If anyone understands what I am trying to tackle at this
young of an age, please speak up. I will need all the help I can get.
Every teensy tiny bit of help will be appreciated.



      Thanks!

        Joseph Rafferty