[Beowulf] How to make a BeagleBoard Elastic R Beowulf Cluster ina Briefcase

[Hearns, John]

> 
> Yes Charlie,
> 
> But my question was relating to the personal use of homegrown
> systems.  There is certainly a use for the same tech in an
> institutional environment.
> 
> But what of homegrown systems that cannot be taken to work, or made
> part of a commercial product, that were just made because it could be
> done?

Hmmmm.   I will chime in here, if I may.
In the early days of home computers (the TRS-80, apple, BBC Micro) days
people did these homebrew projects.
People were very keen on actually learning BASIC programming, and
assembler. there were plans in magazines
for hooking up sensors to serial and parallel ports.

In recent years this has gone away - and let's not get OS centric here.
People will download or buy applications.
But we now see the rise of the iPhone and Android, and again people are
writing simple programs for amusement,
or simple programs to do one thing well.

Where does this leave parallel computing? I for one do not see much
domestic use being made of GPUs.
People have extremely powerful graphics card in home systems - yet there
are no programs being run on them (rather than
graphics oriented games). How about, as a suggestion, motion detection
and face recognition? Your home recognises you,
and phones you if someone else is inside the home. Before anyone says
it, I know there are motion detection cameras,
and software which acts on motion detection, which will SMS you. I'm
just blueskying.

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