[Beowulf] noobs: what comes next?

[Tomislav Maric]

Hello everyone,

it's the noob again. Actually, since my brother Mario joined my quest,
we're in plural now.

After reading loads of info from the net, we kind of figure that we
could read on for the rest of our lives, and still won't learn "enough".
Time to do some work.

Question: the cheapest think we can afford (with me being a mech. eng.
graduate student and my brother in Highschool) would be around 6ish
Intel Mini ITX motherboards like this one:

Intel D945GCLF2D mini-ITX Atom 2x1.6Ghz

a gigabit eth. switch, some cables, and a large box. :) As the master
node we would use our desktop computer.

   We're trying to assemble something that's really cheap (both on
hardware as well as power costs) and that still can do some work. I
would run some coarse grid CFD cases for my MSc on the little guy. Does
this make any sense at all?

   We know that the proper thing would be to benchmark, and then scale,
but in this noobish cheap baby case, there's nothing really to benchmark
for. If we manage to get it working and it proves to be worth doing at
least some coarse grid CFD runs, it would be great for a start.

Best regards,

Tomislav & Mario