2000, a garage Beowulf cluster. By networking cheap, off-the-shelf PC hardware running Linux, we could achieve supercomputer-level performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional UNIX workstations or mainframes.
They said it was “stupid” and “impossible”.
It wasn’t.
Many users praised the garage Beowulf cluster for delivering supercomputer performance with affordable Linux PCs, citing nostalgia for home builds and excitement over personal AI rigs, while a few called the project impractical.
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@BrianRoemmele As I remember, the tech grew out of the need for vast render farms for many of the animated classics, way before GPUs etc. Classic DIY of the era, really hot and noisy as I recall.
@BrianRoemmele The problem wasn't computing power. The problem was interprocessor communication channel. Otherwise any DELL warehouse would have nominally been a supercomputer centre.
When I was working on the Red Hat tech support desk for Collective Technologies (prior to RH going public and pulling support in-house), one of the things I worked on was assisting a University (don't remember which one... A UC school, I think) that had 1000 donated DEC Alpha workstations rebuild their kernel to support Beowulf. We got it up and running, and apparently they were able to get their application ported over to it. One of the coolest things I did in that gig.
2000, a garage Beowulf cluster. By networking cheap, off-the-shelf PC hardware running Linux, we could achieve supercomputer-level performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional UNIX workstations or mainframes.
They said it was “stupid” and “impossible”.
It wasn’t.
@Mouse_TV_ @BrianRoemmele Probably the RedHat Supercomputer CD distro. I still have one.
I cannot recall the exact title.
@BrianRoemmele Impossible for them.
Stupid, because they wouldn't have the will to use it for anything useful.
@BrianRoemmele I built blackrock's compute farm for running distributed monte carlo simulations in 1995. Using the desktop sparcstations for every person on the trading floor - especially when idle at night.
@BrianRoemmele "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those." Classic @slashdot days!
@BrianRoemmele I love Linux. My own LLM is finally up and running on 8 3090s in 4 rigs using 10gbe.
We're losing that functionality now; soon it may not be how it was with cheap compute hardware available anywhere. Now were stuck jail-breaking old phones that have flash locks on them. Slowly the big companies have been locking us out for years.
When will come the day when children will ask what's a PC?
@BrianRoemmele Just reminded me of the niftiness that was Moshe Bar’s mosix shared memory. I put together a few Beowulf cluster s at one time or another.
@BrianRoemmele Arch Linux?
@BrianRoemmele How many clusters would equal a single iphone?
@BrianRoemmele I built one of these. Could calculate Pi and create Mandelbrot sets like a mofo
@BrianRoemmele I did the same for bitcoin in 2009
@BrianRoemmele I started using Sun/Solaris seriously around '99. It was awesome being able to run Linux at home for the price of a PC when Sun boxes were still 5-20k.
@BrianRoemmele I had friend... AriocLord - he had a small one in his house. Lol those days were wild. I wish I got into Linux more then. I stayed Windows. Big mistake, lol.
@BrianRoemmele Not that it invalidates your point, but the computers in the photo are all Sun Sparc and Ultrasparc UNIX workstations.
@BrianRoemmele St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital did the same thing and retired a Cray that took almost a week to generate a protein they wanted to synthesize. The replacement took 7 hrs. 2001, I believe.
@BrianRoemmele I remember that