That was confusing and badly written ("This was not the first time I get entrepreneurial ideas.") so I've read it several times and I still can't figure out what he's on about.<p>Is his idea that somebody might want to pay to use his three-CPU, inhomogeneous, linked-by-ethernet cluster of useless old machines?<p>Or does he want to expand it to a bigger inhomogeneous cluster of useless old machines, until he figures out that he's going to need a much bigger air conditioner (somewhere around the 16 CPU mark)?
The home built "cluster" is not something new. A lot of academics have been doing this for years, sometimes in their labs, sometimes at home. The small cluster is pretty much dead (as per Chris Dadginian). If I wanted to do a lot of number crunching, the way to go would be to get a dedicated 8-core machine and likely use some kind of accelerator (GPU or other). If I wanted more juice, it does get tricky. A serious number crunching cluster needs some fast interconnects, etc, which are not cheap.<p>The fact that he is not familiar with now much parallel code is written in Fortran is a little troubling. I wonder how much he knows about Infiniband, high performance storage, cooling, etc, the tricks that lead to real high teraflops --> sub-petaflop performance, cause if I am not getting that, then his offering has limited use.
2P3s and 1 P4 is not a supercomputer.<p>I bought a Quadcore PC with 4GB Ram for 600€ from Dell recently. A price tag that makes the time to glue your own rotting hardware together a very questionable investment.<p>If really interested in "Supercomputing", I suppose Cell processor (PS3) or GPUs are the way to go...<p>Also, energy consumption might be important. Probably the old CPUs don't really look so good in that respect.
This article was somewhat interesting, but I have to wonder about whether building your own cluster at home would be more cost-effective (considering paying for hardware replacement, electricity, etc.) that just using Amazon S3/EC2.<p>Also, if I was one of the author's prospective customers, I would be more likely to put my trust in Amazon than some guy with 3 computers in his basement.
I've had the inclination to do this sort of thing, but the more hardware you have, the more likely, you'll have a component on some machine that will fail. As one person, you might end up spending all your time replacing or throwing away broken parts to keep the cluster up.<p>The other this is to pay for the electricity of a couple boxes running, regardless of how slow they are at a larger scale.<p>This sort of thing is good as a learning experience, imo, but if one's hoping to scale it up expect to run into lots of infrastructure problems one has to solve.
I wonder if a GPU might be more suitable for his task. Even the 8800GTX is known to do single precision FFTs at more than 55 Gflops which is an order of magnitude more than even contemporary CPUs let alone P4.
Supercomputers at home will be common soon. Intel is going the road of multi-core, I'm typing this on a machine with two 4 core CPUs. Soon we'll have not just 8 but 16 and then 64, etc, cores in a sub $2K machine you can buy from Dell or HP or who ever.
If he just wants to make money from old computers he could install MythTV on it, add tuner cards, and sell a subscription to a remote MythTV box. People overseas might pay for it.<p>Or break the machines up and sell each part on ebay?
Hmm... Interesting.<p>Just a couple of days back I was wondering if I can my web apps from home with a P3 and a P4. The max internet speed in my city is 2 Mbps. Will it be enough if I have two 2 Mbps connections and bridge them? Is it enough to run a Twitter clone for my classmates? (and also my news app)<p>But the security is what bothers me. I plan to use linux and I am using Slackware on my desktop since a month (I refer the docs a dozen times a day). Is very high knowledge of the linux internals necessary to run a web server?