Getting a small cluster running - PC-Chips 810
Jonathan Morton
chromi at chromatix.demon.co.uk
Mon Feb 24 07:48:01 CET 2003
Background: I want to get the most CPU power out of a limited budget,
for use with a research project involving signal processing. So far,
apart from buying a refurbished Mac, the best solution seems to be
building an OpenMOSIX cluster using Athlon-XPs.
I plan to use a "master" computer with a slightly faster CPU than the
slaves, and fitted with a full-function m/board and peripherals. The
master does not need to run LinuxBIOS, but it's existence means it
should be easy to build kernel variants to test, without risking loss
of machine functionality.
To keep the cost of each slave as low as possible, I want to
eliminate all storage hardware from them, including floppy drive.
This means booting Linux over NFS, and/or installing part of it in
the BIOS chip. Hence my interest in LinuxBIOS. If I will need
significant extra hardware to reliably install LinuxBIOS, I might
just as well boot from floppy.
So far, I've identified a PC-Chips 810 board from one of my suppliers:
http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=2050
which will be fitted with an Athlon-XP 2000+, some RAM, a case, a
PSU, and nothing else whatsoever. Total slave cost in this
configuration is under £160 including VAT.
Because this will be used in an academic Engineering department,
there will probably be a Flash and/or EEPROM programmer lying around
somewhere, that I can use rather than swapping BIOS chips.
Can anyone provide guidance on my chances of success, and how easy
this is likely to be?
--
--------------------------------------------------------------
from: Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail: chromi at chromatix.demon.co.uk
website: http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
tagline: The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.
More information about the coreboot
mailing list