On 30 Dec 2001 jwbirdsa(a)picarefy.com wrote:
Supposing one has a farm of older, relatively
slower machines (Sun-2's,
Sun-3's, early SPARCs, 386es, very small VAXen, 68k-based Macs, etc.)
running various Unixes (mostly NetBSD), networked together and connected
to the Net. What does one do with it?
I've been trying to think of some interesting, moderately useful
distributed-computing project that they could sit and crank away at
and haven't come up with much of anything. All the distributed projects
that I know of are distributed because even fast machines aren't enough by
themselves -- a trailing-edge farm can't make a useful contribution.
Well, if you want, email Jeff Fisher guppy(a)techmonkeys.org, and tell him
about your farm. I work with the group of coders @techmonkeys.org, and am
in the process of setting up some Sun3/Sun4, SGI, and VAX hardware for a
another small compile/development farm for open source software. I'm
somewhat limited space wise, as I have to pack everything into a 12x16
building, but it's possible.
You might also want to get in touch with the people with the Samba group,
http://www.samba.org/ specifically Andrew Bartlett abartlet(a)samba.org and
donate cpu time to their build farm
http://build.samba.org/ too. I'm
planning to do this with my machines once my new building is finished.
-Toth