On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Jay Kline wrote:

> A friend of mine wants to do some serious number crunching. (He is a math theory
> major at NAU- go figure) The problem is, he doesn't have a super computer.  So his
> thought was to make a bootable CD with Linux on it to make a computer a Beowulf
> cluster node.  Then, make another CD to serve as the "master" to all the nodes.
> His thought was to pop the CD's into computers at the lab at night, and let it
> process away till dawn.  A floppy disk on the master could serve as a place to
> save data.

I've been wanting to do this for awhile myself, but never had the
hardware.  If you read the beowulf-HOWTO you'll see how basically the
cluster is one controller machine (head node) and the rest are peons.  All
the peons are identically configured aside from the IP address.  If you
have enough RAM in the machines, you could probably make a floppy disk
syatem to load the linux kernel, DHCP an address, ftp and mount a ramdisk
image that would contain all your workspace.  This is all theory, mind
you.

-Brian