FEF:Processing Cluster

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Processing Cluster

The Free Earth Foundation (the non profit that was formed and tasked with keeping this place running) has voted to dedicate a substantial portion of their budget (50% maximum) to build a cluster of machines to process data for use in World Wind and other applications. Their will also be a donation drive in order to quickly raise money for the purchase of cluster machines.

Specifications

It has determined that the best course of action is to use large numbers of second hand machines. These machines while somewhat slower individually achieve a much lower cost per gigahertz allowing us to achieve a larger ammount of processing power at a lower cost. We are planning the initial build to be 100 machines large, of one of the two following machines (or a mix of both):

IBM Pentium 3 1 Ghz
256 MB SDRAM
20 GB IDE Hard Disk
10/100 Ethernet

or

Compaq Pentium 3 866 Mhz
256 MB SDRAM
12 GB IDE Hard Disk
10/100 Ethernet

with the former costing 70$ each, and the latter 50$ each. We have initially purchased 5 of the IBM's for benchmarks and testing.