If you get the clusterKnoppix LiveCD, there is at least one prime calculating client on the disk IIRC. That is supposed to be for testing the cluster. You boot one unit to the LiveCD or to it loaded on a HDD to be the master node, and the other units are set to bootp or PXE and they connect up to the master node on boot. Obviously, there are many ways to make this work and clusterKnoppix is not the only answer.

Check out www.grid.org . Apparently some of the distributed.net team and a few SETI@home guys got jobs there at United Devices www.uniteddevices.com, who also does grid.org as a non-profit project.

-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of James Sissel Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 12:50 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Somewhat OT: Top 500 list I love those projects and I'm involved in 4 of them. SETI - looking for ET, Einstein - looking for gravity waves, folding proteins, and climate forecasting. I've got anywhere from 1-3 PCs dedicated to them at all times. But that's distributed computing and not a supercomputer. Do you think KU or UMKC might have a suitable project for a small supercomputer? Or how about some of our local medical research companies? Maybe we could offer it to Channel 9 so they can get our local weather forecasts right (tongue in cheek). "Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO" [email protected] wrote:

I know that finding primes and cracking encryption is not considered sexy, but that is one basic thing you can use to test your computing cluster. After that you could move to the SETI client, folding@home, one of the other protein folding clients. Those folding clients may actually help people down the road. Start here: http://www.ibiblio.org/gferg/ldp/Distributed-Computing-HOWTO/ for a list of projects.