Microwulf: A Personal, Portable Beowulf Cluster

[vizwhiz]

http://www.calvin.edu/~adams/research/microwulf/

 

so what The hell happened To Beowulf?

where wulf? quote below is direct from url page (entirely)

 

 

Microwulf is a personal, portable Beowulf cluster, providing over 26 Gflops of measured performance, for less than $2500. Its dimensions are just 11" x 12" x 17", making it small enough to fit on one's desktop or in a suitcase.

Microwulf was designed and built by Calvin CS professor Joel Adams and senior Tim Brom. For more details, click one of the links below:

• Design
  
• Hardware Manifest
  
• System Configuration Notes
  
• Photos
  
• Performance
  
• Price/Performance Ratio
  
• Power/Performance Ratio
  
• Uses
  
• Cluster Monkey article

Update: As of Aug 1, 2007, Microwulf can be built for $1256, improving its price/performance ratio to less than $48/Gflop. See the Cluster Monkey article above for the details.

 

ok, just read This briefly, not sure about OS and video cards &/or monitor, but it does look like low cost computing possibility

 

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if anyone else reads This and can add more info: wiki This Thread

and maybe we can build a low cost rendering farm in The background

 

Thanks

 

randy

[vizwhiz]

1st edit

 

http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/211/1/

 

i am reading The ClusterMonkey article, The following seems To be important

 

For our CPUs, we chose AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 AM2+ CPUs. At $165 each in January 2007, these 2.0 GHz dual-core CPUs were the most cost-efficient CPUs we could find. (They are even cheaper now - about $65.00 on 8/1/07).

 

To keep the size as small as possible we chose MSI Micro-ATX motherboards. These boards are fairly small (9.6" by 8.2") and have an AM2 socket that supports AMD's multicore Athlon CPUs. More precisely, we used dual-core Athlon64 CPUs to build an 8-core cluster, but we could replace those CPUs with AMD quad-core Athlon64 CPUs and have a 16-core cluster, without changing anything else in the system!

 

will add more info as Time goes by

i called The author of This project, hoping To hear back from him

 

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Thanks

 

randy

[AJLynn]

It's a cluster of 4 dual-core 2.0GHz boxes. You need to run cluster/farm software. You can probably get much better performance out of an extremely overclocked single Q6600 box.