h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Suddenly I'm totaly unimpressed. You should describe it as dual 522Mhz mendocinos then rather than adding the two processors speeds together since to anything that isn't written to specificaly take advantage of smp the second processor is useless.

You mean, like the Windows NT I'm running on it? OK, I can't run a single task at 1.044GHz, but, for example, I can run two instances of SETI@Home, one on each processor, achieving the same effect. Anyhow, the machine was built specifically to run Lightwave and Photoshop, and they're both fully SMP-aware.

I use mainly red hat derived linux, cos trying to get rpm's to work with anything else is a pain. However, I am now experimenting with EXTREME linux, and hoping to get a beowulf cluster up and running. (can you do beowulf with bsd?) It's a great way to waste lots of time getting your old 386, 486, and anything else not five minutes ago to do something useful. Up the massively parallel processing!!!

Xyroth, look for a copy of the recent O'Reilly book, "Building Linux Clusters" by David HM Spector - it comes with a Beowulf-enabled version of Red Hat v6.2 (The "Extreme Linux" CD is based on Red Hat v5.0)

I only got it (from Amazon) earlier this week, but what I've seen looks really helpful.

List price is US$44.95, but you can get it from Amazon.co.uk for a shade under £30 inc. postage. In the worst case, you could request it from your local library, but they have a habit of removing the CD before letting the public near this sort of book.

ISBN Number = 1-56592-625-0

You should be able to build clusters out of BSD boxes. The linux idea is the one everyone thinks of because that's where the spotlight is. I'd have thought that most of the tools and libraries needed would compile and run (maybe with a small amount to tweaking).

The badge being maybe a combination of the h2g2 thingy and a penguin?

Running Suse 6.4 at home, but learning too slowly to really get it to kick a... hmm, behind.