CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to ROY J. TELLASON:

CA>> If you find that concept interesting I do have a link to
CA>> instructions for setting up a beowulf cluster of legacy
CA>> hardware  DOS machines at my tech website and it's not a
CA>> gag, it's real. ;-) 

RJT> How old is the hardware you refer to here? 

CA> 8088 XTs?

Yes?  And what can you _do_ with a bunch of these?

RJT> The thing that gets me about that stuff is that it still
RJT> takes up space, 

CA> They don't all need monitors, stack them. :-)

True.

RJT> I'd need to find someplace to *put* all those machines, it
RJT> takes power (there are only _two_ outlets in this room), 

CA> Powerstrip.

Bunches of them in here now already.

RJT> and it takes networking (I have some cards, but don't plan
RJT> to use them all up like that). 

CA> This setup uses serial port cables.

Hmm.

RJT> And what do you get out of it? 

CA> Bragging rights?

Heh.

RJT> My understanding is that this sort of thing is good if you're 
RJT> running something that has a pretty heavy computational load, 

CA> True. 

RJT> but that's not the case for most of what I do here, which tends to 
RJT> bottleneck with communication speeds (both LAN and modem), and 
RJT> with storage space, which is why my next project is going to be 
RJT> the server I've started but haven't gotten around to finishing 
RJT> yet.

CA> 100 ten gig hard drives in a RAID configuration? ;-) 

Got _one_ that size so far,  and it's IDE.  Of SCSI,  I have a 4.3G,  I
think, and a bunch of 2G.  And a full tower case and a nice DPT card. 
Finding a SCSI cable that'll support more than 4 devices is a bit more
difficult than I'd expected,  so my plan at this point is to use the
external connector and run it back into the box,  at least for now. 
Donations of hardware will be gladly accepted,  particularly 10G or larger
drives.  :-)

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