[humorix] Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

Affordable Virtual Beowulf Cluster
March 23, 2000

Every nerd drools over Beowulf clusters, but very few have
even seen one, much less own one.  Until now, that is. 
Eric Gylgen, the open source hacker famous for EviL (the
dancing ASCII paperclip add-on to vi), is working on a
program code-named "VirtualEpicPoem" that will emulate
Beowulf clusters on a standard desktop PC.

"It's like any other emulator," Eric explained.  "But
instead of Windows bluescreens, this one emulates a 256
node Beowulf cluster.  Now every nerd can purchase the
hardware to build a Beowulf cluster for only a few hundred
bucks."

"Of course," he added candidly, "the performance of the
virtual cluster will be many orders of magnitude less than
a real cluster, but that's not really the point.  I just
want to be able to brag that I run a 256 node cluster."

Eric has prior experience in this field.  Last month he
successfully built a real 32 node Beowulf cluster out of
Palm Pilots, old TI-8x graphing calculators, various
digital cameras, and even some TRS-80s.  "The performance
rivaled that of a Pentium 500... if, ahem, the CPU is
sitting at minus 100 Celsius with all of its cache
disabled."

He demonstrated a pre-alpha version of his VirtualEpicPoem
software yesterday at Humorix World Headquarters.  His
Athlon machine emulated a 256 node Beowulf cluster in which
each node, running Linux, was emulating its own 16 node
Beowulf cluster in which each node, running Bochs on Linux,
was emulating VMWare under Windows to emulate Linux running
UAE to emulate old Amiga software.  The system was
extremely slow, but it worked.

---

James S. Baughn
http://i-want-a-website.com/about-linux/


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