Trailing-edge compute farm seeks gainful employment

From: jwbirdsa_at_picarefy.com <(jwbirdsa_at_picarefy.com)>
Date: Sun Dec 30 17:21:42 2001

   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.

   If network Tierra (an artificial-life research project) had ever come to
pass, that would have been a superb application for these beasts. But it
didn't.

   Ideas, anyone? Please?

   --James B.
Received on Sun Dec 30 2001 - 17:21:42 GMT