[Beowulf] The Walmart Compute Node?

[Jim Lux]

At 10:39 AM 11/8/2007, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>On Thu, 8 Nov 2007, Peter St. John wrote:
>
>>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?
>
>Well by now you surely have heard the YMMV litany enough times not to
>hear it again from me, but YMMV quite a bit here so let me indicate a
>few potential difficulties.
>
>  a) For this money, I'm guessing the CPU is a 32 bit Celery, which has a
>very small L2.

More likely a Via CPU of some sort.


Jim