I was looking at a microwulf type cluster. Taking some of my older machines (single core) and making a Quad and running the SMP client on them. Any idea if this would work?
We’re talking about 2GHz Athlons for the project. I doubt that two of them together would get the job done, and I’m sure that there is some overhead from having the chips on different systems, but I suspect that 4 together might do a pretty decent job.
Each of these systems singularly would post about 100ppd (give or take). So I’m looking at 400 at best.
A single dual-core with each core running about 2GHz with the smp client will post about 450ppd.
The way I figure it I should get near 600ppd even with the inefficiency. Not bad for keeping a few older systems around.
I could also save a little bit of power by having them in a microwulf as I would only need a HDD and other peripherals on one system.
Give me any feedback you might have on this as I trust your judgement (that’s probably foolish).
I won’t be able to start work on this project for a bit more than a week as I’m in Korea with our troops, but it seems like a fun project.
The Folding forums have a couple of beowulf threads. The general consensus is that you need a GB lan and lots of memory to keep the work unit writes from overwhelming the bandwidth of your network.
SMP works well with multiple cores on a chip since the bandwidth is so great. Thrashing is a very real problem as bottlenecks develop across the network.
You will not get anywhere near full performance, but the points bonus alone may make it worthwhile.
It can’t hurt to experiment. Keep us posted.