Dear Mailing list members, I'm Miguel A. Mota Jr., Co-Founder and President of the Woodrow Wilson High School Science & Technology Club in Camden, New Jersey USA. With a few small grants from Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs, we have developed a parallel-processing Linux Cluster based on openMosix cluster technology. In a attempt to make this new technology more useful and efficient, I have integrated LAM-MPI and PVM into our cluster, giving it certain advantages of a Beowulf Cluster. The Nodes boot a custom CD-based mini-Linux distribution and configure themselves via DHCP, thus making them quite inexpensive and plug-n-play. I feel that this mixture of technologies makes cheap and yet efficient clusters. Our cluster is not that advanced in terms of hardware. Its not much, but its a modest start for a few minority teenagers in a urban city pushing for the movement of Open Source software. Its a star topology Fast Ethernet TCP switched cluster with 7 nodes. Here's a few key specs:
- Server: AMD 750Mhz Duron w/390MB PC133 SD-RAM - Masternode AMD 750Mhz Duron w/128MB PC133 SD-RAM - Nodes 1&2: Intel 800MHz Celerons w/128MB PC133 SD-RAM - Nodes 3&4: AMD 650MHz Durons w/128MB PC133 SD-RAM - Nodes 5-7: Intel 450MHz Pentiums w/128MB PC133 SD-RAM
We are currently trying to expand, but Lucent's loses in the stock market has affected our funding. So now we are trying to find companies willing to donate anything down to a 75Mhz PC, but no luck yet. While reading the paper, I came across an article on the clusters at Los Alamos. My understanding is that they booting their kernels from a Server. I was wondering if it could be possible to have our Nodes boot an ISO image off our Server in a similar fashion? This could allow us to bring the cost of Nodes down to $100 USD and utilize 486 DX PCs as well. I appreciate anyone's responses and thank you for your time.
Miguel A. Mota Jr. Chaos325@Netzero.net