[Beowulf] why we need cheap, open learning clusters

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Mark Hahn
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 2:45 PM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org List
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] why we need cheap, open learning clusters

> The "Minnow Board" http://www.minnowboard.org/ might be of interest, 
> though

cute.  though if I had to put together a demo cluster where performance was not the goal, I might consider using cheap wifi routers.  just ignore the wifi: think of them as very cheap, low-power MIPS "servers" 
with built-in support for interesting network topologies (FNN, etc).


after all, if you're trying to build character, you might as well also deal with having as little as 32M ram and processors slow enough to notice ;)

probably also one of the few clusters that could run from a quite modest battery.



Clever Idea..
A WRT54 cluster...

Battery power, maybe not.  Those wireless access points draw surprisingly high powers (and not because the radio is on, although a 100 mW radio probably draws a watt).

>From measurements made today, a D-link DAP-1522 draws 0.3A -0.4 A from a 12V battery (feeding through a 12V->5V DC/DC converter).  I don't know that this is amenable to hacking, but, still, 4 watts is a fair amount of power.  The Intel D2550MUD2 boards with a  Intel SSD that I am using in the same system (and similar to those that LittleFE uses) draw a nice even 10-11 Watts from the same 12V battery.   One of those 7 Amp Hour "bricks" could probably run a LittleFE for an hour.