[Beowulf] Supercomputers - iPad versus Cray

[Mark Hahn]

> Any more bizarre than a cluster of Furbies? Or PS/2s, or any other weird hardware.

well, playstations had cell chips, which were, in their day, pretty
respectable.  to me, that's pure beowulf, in the classic sense.

clustering very light-weight machines is sort of amusing, but it's hard 
to imagine a less appropriate substrate than an iPad.  completely mundane
hardware, extremely expensive display and touch panel, slow, small memory,
no ethernet.

a cluster of pogoplug mobiles would be pretty amusing instead,
though pandaboards and the like have better cpus.  the latter always 
seem overpriced, since you can get whole netbook for less.

OK, I did think of a way that would be pretty cool in a demo/kluge,
almost performance-art way: have the iPads communicate 
by modulating their LCD, and receiving via the screen-side camera.
I didn't say it was practical ;)

it would be hillarious to see a ring of ipads flashing QR codes at each other
while running linpack.  well, to me at least!

anyone want to donate a pile of iPads?  actually, a pile of android tabs
would be even better, since you can put a decent/open dev env on them.

regards, mark hahn.