The Stone Soupercomputer at Oak Ridge National Labs is composed of
74 nodes (as of the moment) of 486 and 586 class machines. All
donated, delivering a price/performance ratio of zero but a
performance/price ratio of infinity. (see the URL below) There's
no reason that I can think of (keeping in mind that it's nearing
midnight and the day started for me at about 5 a.m. :-) that would
preclude the implementation of 386 class machines in this type
of arrangement.
I'm sure the slower machines might try your patience
a bit, but for free cpu cycles I'm sure lots of interesting things
could get done that would require significant resources otherwise.
As I was reading in Byte today, with the advances in distributed
computing (Beowulf systems are a good example) does it matter
wether you have a bunch of slower nodes (say 64 nodes at 100 MHz)
or fewer faster nodes (32 nodes at 200 MHz). Yes, there are likely to be
administrative issues that differ between the classes of machine, but
all in all even 386 systems could be put to good use in such a project.
--Kit
The Stone SouperComputer homepage can be found at;
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/facilities/beowulf/
--
Kit Cosper Linux Hardware Solutions, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
System solutions you can count on, system solutions that work.
1-888-LINUX-HW
Now offering Digital Alpha systems with up to 4 MB SRAM cache.
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