[Beowulf] The Walmart Compute Node?

Peter St. John peter.st.john at gmail.com
Thu Nov 8 09:36:17 PST 2007


Recently, probably you noticed, Walmart began selling a $200 linux PC.
(Apparently the OS is just Ubuntu 7.10 with a small xindow manager
instead of Gnome or KDE). Now Slashdot points to
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5305482907.html, the MB being sold
separately for $60 ("development board"). It has 1.5GHz CPU,
unpopulated memory (slots for 2GB), one 10/100 connection. Does this
look to y'all like fair FLOPS/$ for a kitchen project? I'm thinking 6
of them as compute nodes per 8 port router, with a bigger head node
for fileserving. (actually I'll use a spare room but you know what I
mean). An arrangement like this might be faster RAM access per core,
compared to multicore, since each core has no competition for is't own
memory, right?
Thanks,
Peter



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