phillhutt

Just watched another episode of Hak5, and they talked about cluster computing. More specifically, clustering computers you have lying around at home. The one they talked about specifically was Cluster Knoppix. It is, you guessed it, a linux distro, based on Knoppix (did you really guess that?). You can boot it from CD, so you don’t have to install anything. You can boot it up on a bunch of computers, and just start running some CPU intensive process. It will automatically split itself up among all the machines in the cluster in an effort to finish the job faster. There are obvious bottlenecks here, mainly in the network. If all the computers were running gigabit LAN, then it might not be so bad. You should try this out, it would be something that sounds really fun to set up, but I really have no use for it at all. Other than trying to set up a big FAH farm or something.

Actually, I looked into putting together a cheap computer for fun that I can use for whatever the fook I want, and I could put one together for $307 USD after tax and shipping. It was an AMD 2GHz processor of some description (I don’t really know AMD, but it was literally a $20 processor I think on sale) 2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM, 500GB HDD (at $70 this was the most expensive part). On board graphics, that would be fine. Pretty rad. Can’t quite afford that right now though, so I’ll probably try and put something together in the new year. Or, try ebay for some cheap desktops!