[Gllug] Beagle Board

[Peter Corlett]

On 12 Jan 2009, at 10:43, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> Peter Corlett wrote:
>> From a slow ARM chip with limited memory and storage and no
>> networking? What an awesome cluster that would be!
> so, perhaps a routerboard based setup ?

That fixes the lack of networking, but doesn't really address the  
other points.

>> 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.
> Those sort of machines are a waste of space, power and money - might  
> as
> well get a half decent quad core desktop for £400 rather than 8 of  
> those
> machines. And the quad core will run 8 vm's mostly faster than what
> those 8 machines will.

Quite. However virtualisation is also an imperfect emulation: while it  
may be able to divvy up CPU appropriately, networking will probably  
work out faster than a real cluster (since it doesn't have to go over  
an actual network) and disk I/O would be slower (because there are  
fewer spindles and it's more I/O starved.)


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