[TriLUG] Dogpile Massively Parallel Supercomputer

[Christian J Hedemark]

I'm still coping with the reality of what just happened, but my back is
hurting from all the lifting, so I know it is true.  Bruce Smith thought
he'd go to a government auction today, and from the auction his wife called
me up pretty excited saying they needed help getting all this stuff home.
No one could prepare me for how much "stuff" there was.

I used to load tractor trailers for UPS back in high school so I feel pretty
confident in saying that all the computer stuff Bruce bought would pretty
much fill a tractor trailer.  Sure, lots of it was junk.  All of it was more
than 3 years old.  But there is just so much of it.

So far we've found somewhere around 30 IBM brand PC's that are all at least
Pentium class machines.  Most have ethernet, and the few random samples I
opened up still had their memory & CPU's.  There are also a number of older
Power PC macs and even older Macs.

We're planning on taking those IBM's and setting up a Beowulf in my
basement.  Why?  Why not!  This is going to be the Dogpile Cluster.  We're
going to start taking inventory tomorrow morning of what we have so far (and
there is still a lot more left in the government barn he bought the contents
of, which we need to pick up early next week).  We're also going to put in a
few dedicated circuits tomorrow in my crawlspace.   Air conditioning?  We're
going to open the vents and put a fan in there. :-)   This is the ultimate
in low tech redneck supercomputing.

Once we've got all the stuff at my place I'll take some photos and put them
up.  We're actually throwing out more than we are taking because there is
just TOO MUCH (mostly monitors and old macs being tossed, as well as some
old educational films and LP's and such).

So for all of you who have wanted to build a beowulf but never got around to
it, we're open to some suggestions on what to do with dogpile once it is up
and running.

Chris