Possbile uses of Beowulf ... ?

[Donald Becker]

On Fri, 4 May 2001, Stephan Robert Sauerburger wrote:

> > The Scyld documentation is found online at the Scyld site, and the cost of
> > the personal CD is about $3.00 USD which is rather cheap through Linux
> > Central.

> Yeah, when I first saw the price at scyld's site, I was thinking "why
> bother?"..  It seems like it's little more than enough to compensate
> for the price of the medium, and maybe a little for the S&H
> troubles.. Why not just offer the iso image of the disc at an FTP site
> of theirs to download ourselves and burn, and maybe save the trouble?

It's less expensive to subsidize the cost of the CD than to provide the
bandwidth to download the ISO image.

While we like to think otherwise, bulk data is still transferred most
effectively through the mail.  The wholesale cost of bandwith is about
$8-14/GB, with the typical retail cost of $20.  That means a 660MB ISO
image costs about $10-14, potentially at each side of the transfer
depending on how your ISP handles "peerage".

While we do provide FTP transfer for potential or current customers,
almost no one that anonymously downloads the whole CD is likely to be a
paying customer or an active developer.  And the zero apparent cost of
public FTP means that we end up with mirror sites that download an
updated ISO without anyone ever having looking at the previous version.

Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Second Generation Beowulf Clusters
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993