Linux Desktop Clustering - Pick Your Pricerange

crashlight writes: "A Linux cluster on the desktop--Rocket Calc just announced their 8-processor "personal" cluster in a mid-tower-sized box. Starting at $4500, you get 8 Celeron 800MHz processors, each with 256MB RAM and a 100Mbps ethernet connection. The box also has an integrated 100Mbps switch. Plus it's sexy." Perhaps less sexy, but for a lot less money, you can also run a cluster of Linux (virtual) machines on your desktop on middle-of-the-road hardware. See this followup on Grant Gross's recent piece on Virtual Machines over at Newsforge.

Wow... what a markup!

[eaglej]

Yeah, it's a nice compact little box... But they're pulling in a phat few g's on each box. I'll build my own, thank you very much.

under engineered.

[azephrahel]

I'm sorry, but for that price this is way under engineered. The origonal bewulf cluster was made with components on par, for the day, as the celeron modle of the redstone, for far less. If your going to spend the time and money building and marketing systems like this, they could have done a better job. They suck mobos in a big case and eth linked them togeather. Call me crazy but I think for that much money you could get a small backplane, 8 industrial PC's (powerpc/copermine/whatever on a pci card each w/its own memory) toss em in and spend the rest of your "engineering" budget, making a patch to the kernel for reliable communication over the bus, instead of slow eth connections.

besides with the speed advantages shared memory brings to multiprocessing a quad xenon would probably outpreform this.. deffinately a quad proc ultrasparc but those are pricey even used...

Re:Virtual macines???

[PD]

Maybe I want to develop software for a Beowulf cluster, but either I don't have a cluster of my own, or I just want to write the software, not run it in production. Either way, a set of 8 virtual processors would be good enough for the job.

Re:Hey

[ch-chuck]

Sure, why not. If an 'internet' is a network of networks, we should be able to build a cluster of clusters. One cluster calculates the reality I'm flying thru while another one calculates the effects of the nuclear device I just heaved, both feed into the headmounted 3D stereo graphics processor with surround sound audio helmet on the hydraulically actuated platform, while an input/output cluster handles sim data from the other players over the fibre channel...

Do-it-Yourself Cheap Clusters

[ChaoticCoyote]

I've been building my cluster from various remaindered/cast-off/refurbished machines I find. Computer Geeks [compgeeks.com] is a good source.

Load balancing is frelling difficult, but I've been doing some solid parallel programming work that translates nicely to "real" clusters. I'd love to buy one of the Rocket Calc boxes -- but I can make a darned nice box for a lot less money with more processing power, if I'm willing to have cables and such all over the place.

The only real cluster-related problem I have is my lovely wife. She's one of those people who want things to "match" (so why in frell did she marry me?), and my "heterogenous" cluster just isn't very aesthetic. She just doesn't understand that the cluster's job is to compute, not to look pretty!

Then again, the Rocket Calc machines are attractive, and the color would go with the living room furniture...