Dell Pentium II for $50

[Johnsmith]

Originally posted by: ERJ
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.....

Oh wait, wrong site

That is great for cluster. But no hard drive is a big problem.

I recommed my advisor to spend $5000 research funds for 100 of them and another $5000 for cables, hard drive more RAM, etc for a 100 nodes cluster. We need that for our research. Total $10000 for a 100 nodes cluster and I could do the assembly job for free.

He just did not trust the qulity of these computers and said no.

I am considering buy four of them and build a mini-cluster for myself.

 

[ChefJoe]

Heh... running a 100 machine cluster would take a ton of floor space, perhaps KVM equipment, and $50 per machine isn't going to get you much in the HD/ram department (yes, we know there's hot deals, but hot deals in 100 quantity is somewhat limited). When you get down to it, I have to wonder if a bunch of P4 2.4 533FSB with 1 gig of ddr ram (we're talking $1000 a piece) would be more efficient. My understanding was beowulf was made to avoid expensive multiprocessor designs, but you want to max the CPU, memory, and perhaps the network interface if using a controlling/data server.

 

[unclebud]

my pops has a 166 optiplex dell gxa he bought off somebody at the computer show for $250 a year ago *cringes*
it's still working, only thing was the proprietary ps that dell charged $75 to send (refurbished also)
got two dells at work, 450 and 550, one with 95b, other with 98se
they are all still running
i don't love dell
but i don't hate them either
hope some are still left for me to show the coworkers tomorrow...