I am getting ready to purchase @ 8 Computers from work. The machines are 166MMX with a hard drive and 64megs of ram. I am wondering if I will be able to run all of these on a network with these as nodes and just have one machine with the Monitor, keyboard and stuff? I am trying to do this on the cheap. I am running SETI@Home and was thinking about setting up these machines to do this if possible.
I have been reading about people setting up beowulf style clusters with older machines just to see if this can be done. Can you run SETI on a cluster? What types of programs are available to run on clusters?

Thanks for you help,

Christopher

You can certainly run a bunch of linux machines without a monitor/keyboard for each machine. Just load up the OS, put the machines somewhere out of the way and you are done. Remote administration is no problem at all. Just ssh in and you are all set. If you prefer X you can either use VNC or just a remote X session.

I have considered setting up a beowulf cluster just to try it out. I probably will when I get some spare time. For this situation it is probably not necessary. Of course if you are interested in trying it out it wouldn't hurt anything.


BTW you may want to check out http://www.linuxquestions.org/seti/index.html

Saw this in the SETI FAQ and thought you may be interested.

Here is a great article on Linux Clustering. It goes into the pros and cons different kinds of clusters and gives a good overview of what is available.

http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-10/clustering_01.html