[Gllug] Beagle Board

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 10:19:27AM +0000, Peter Corlett wrote:
> On 8 Jan 2009, at 12:29, Richard Jones wrote:
> [...]
> > I'm relatively tempted to do something which I've wanted to do for a
> > very long time -- build a home cluster out of these.  You could have
> > an 8 node cluster for around 800 quid.
> 
>  From a slow ARM chip with limited memory and storage and no  
> networking? What an awesome cluster that would be!

The point is that the architecture makes interesting projects possible
such as: true Distributed Shared Memory, or a distributed OS written
entirely in asm/FORTH, or a pure-functional distributed OS.

BTW these aren't really that slow.  Although the central core runs at
a mere 400 MHz, they also have 6 DSP cores (cut down ARM cores), and a
GPU, so 8 opportunities for parallel computation on each board.
Exploiting 64 cores of varying types, with large latencies to each
other and main memory, is what makes it interesting.

> There's a chap down the TCR markets who has a pile of old IBM desktops  
> for £50 that look rather more suited to clustering experiments.

I don't have the space, power or indeed the transport for that.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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