From: sagrillo@tiac.net (DeAnn Iwan)
Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
Subject: Re: Newbie Question.....Please forgive my ignorance.
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 03:42:23 GMT
Organization: The Internet Access Company, Inc.
Message-Id: <366df0fe.49941268@news.tiac.net>
References: <3668b705.1519714@news.supernews.com>
    <366ad8fa.4741360@news.tiac.net> <366b4964.40947817@news.supernews.com>


On Mon, 07 Dec 1998 11:43:58 GMT, yakkman@hotmail.com (Boris Yakk)
wrote:

>On Sun, 06 Dec 1998 19:25:20 GMT, sagrillo@tiac.net (DeAnn Iwan)
>wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 05 Dec 1998 04:40:24 GMT, yakkman@hotmail.com (Boris Yakk)
>>wrote:
>
>>     I am setting up a network with 4 486s--and find it  a very good
>>learning tool.  However, if you do some timing analysis, you will find
>>that 1 new Celeron at 450 MHz will run about as much as 20
>>486s--assuming great additiveness in the 486s.  I also find that the
>>money I spend on cables is worth more than the machines.  The 10baseT
>>will bog down very quickly (it is about as fast as an ISA bus).
>
>THANK YOU!  That is what I was looking for.  Since this whole PVM
>thing is new to me, I was totally unaware of the scalability of the
>486 and how it compares to current processor technology.
>
>- Boris

      The original Beowulf striped 2 ethernet cards in each of 16
machines (100 MHz 486s) and found that kept throughput up pretty well.
So, if you have 200 machines with ethernet cards, you could do some
interesting networks with subsets of them.  That is, cannabilize
machines to get lots of memory, etc.  (I would add more machines to my
network if they were quasi free.)