So I want to build a personal Beowulf cluster. What is a Beowulf cluster you ask? It's a high performance cluster of inexpensive personal computers. In in very simplistic way it's going from one horse pulling your cart to a team of horses doing it. The work load is spread to all the computers in the cluster, creating one single super computer.
Why you ask? Why not I answer. No I do not have a practical application of this in mind. I want to try to build it because I think I can. My inspiration is Professer Joel Adams at Calvin College. His Microwulf cost 2500 dollars in January of 2007 and was capable of 26 Gflops. One Giga flops is 10 to the ninth floating point operations per second. The first Cray-1 Supercomputer was sold to the Los Alamos National Laboratory for $8.86 million (US) and was only capable of about 160 Mega flops.
The system I want to build will run about 1300 dollars, and I expect 40 to 50 Gflops. However my performance estimates could be way off. I've never built a cluster before. But then that's why I want to do this. Some people want to run a marathon, I want to build a supercomputer.
Now the question is how to come up with 1300 dollars...
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