From: rjbono@hiline.net (Rick Bono)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Re: Home Supercomputing?
Date: 17 Oct 1998 06:22:04 GMT
Organization: http://www.supernews.com,
Approved: bigrigg@cs.cmu.edu
Message-Id: <709d2c$7j9$1@encore.ece.cmu.edu>
Originator: bigrigg@ece.cmu.edu


On 4 Oct 1998 03:35:36 GMT, Douglas Baker <jiffymir@eskimo.com> wrote:

>I'm curious as to what it takes to set up a parallel computer.  I've got a
>couple of old i386 and i486 boxes lying around and would like to put them
>to use.
>
>Is the a book available?
>Online documentation?
>

As luck would have it I have just done this with several machines at
home.  A couple of good starting places are www.extremelinux.org and 
www.beowulf.org  A copy of the extremelinux CD is helpful. Got mine at
www.lsl.com for about $20.

There is likely some hardware issues you'll have. You'll need a LAN
set-up. I'm using 10Mbit ethernet. Make sure the cards you buy are
linux compatible. 

A good test is to run PVMPOV raytracer. This can be set up to run on
one machine versus many. I clocked a 25% rendering improvement using
one 200Mhz K6, one 133Mhz 586, two 486 66's and a lowly 50Mhz 486
laptop. The 200 end up doing about 60% of the work.

Hope this helps.

Rick

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