Beowulfs at Home

This is a subject near and dear to my heart as I've had a beowulf at home for several years now. Amazing as it may seem, it is now entirely possible to build a beowulf-class cluster at home, and in fact there are some very useful reasons to think about doing so.

It has become possible for several reasons:

• Computers have become almost unbelievably cheap. Very respectably configured Intel or Athlon based computers are available for as little as $650 (US) with a graphical head, Windows installed, and some useless gingerbread. If you can get them to keep Windows and give you more memory, a bigger disk, and perhaps a nicer monitor you can get a ``head node'' (which doubles as a general purpose desktop) for under $1000.

• Compute nodes, which need be little more than a case with a processor, some memory, and a network card (no, you don't need even a floppy disk if you have a PXE/bootp NIC) can cost as little as $500.

• Even a fast ethernet switch, which used to be quite costly, is now available for as little as $100 for 8 ports (quite enough for a small beowulf).

• All the components can serve more than one purpose. In my house, many nodes are also desktops. In this way I cover my wife and kids' desktops and also get to use their (mostly idle) CPUs over the network.