I went to a computer show today and ended up buying a few computers/parts ranging from a pentium 133mhz to a pIII 866mhz for distributed computing/proxies/fileservers. this got me thinking about what the ideal computer for distributed computing would be, in terms of price/performance ratio. imagine a i know that different distributed computing clients run better on different cpu's so let take the exaples of distributed.net, seti, folding, and prime95. the components needed would be:
psu
case (convience only)
cpu
ram
hd (maybe there is a way around this? some sort of network boot?)
graphics (if not on board)
lan (if not on board)
the keyboard and monitor and cdrom (if needed) could be borrowed from another computer for setup purposes.
so the question is: given any amount of $ to spend (lets say $1000) what hardware would you get if your goal was to make the most cost effective distributed computing boxes for the various projects listed above? electricity is not a concern. obviously spending $10 on 100 20mhz '486's is not the best approach, and spending $1000 on a single p4 is not much better. this image curve explains it better than i did. imagine the cost on one axis and performance on the other...
edit: forgot the image
psu
case (convience only)
cpu
ram
hd (maybe there is a way around this? some sort of network boot?)
graphics (if not on board)
lan (if not on board)
the keyboard and monitor and cdrom (if needed) could be borrowed from another computer for setup purposes.
so the question is: given any amount of $ to spend (lets say $1000) what hardware would you get if your goal was to make the most cost effective distributed computing boxes for the various projects listed above? electricity is not a concern. obviously spending $10 on 100 20mhz '486's is not the best approach, and spending $1000 on a single p4 is not much better. this image curve explains it better than i did. imagine the cost on one axis and performance on the other...
edit: forgot the image
Last edited: