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