Completely agreed.  Quite frankly, I don't think the DC is enough bang 
for the buck to justify trying to cluster them right now (as much as I 
love running it).  Really, I think the bottleneck here is in the BBA 
adapter, which I'm sure most of us on this list know is a bit hard to 
come by.
However, if you're planning on clustering the DC, computational power 
is going to be the limiting factor in terms of time will probably end 
up being CPU power, not bandwidth.  To this effect, I'd really like to 
see modem support and PPP, and boot the DC from a cdrom which would 
have everything it needed rather than via NFS.  From what I've read, 
writing a modem driver would be somewhat difficult, so I don't know how 
realistic this would be.
However, if it could be done, you can easily find used/old DC's for 
20-30USD, which would be a good start for clustering.

Just my $0.02

-Nik

On Tuesday, May 27, 2003, at 01:15  PM, Alex Kirk wrote:
> Thanks for forwarding that along -- it is interesting. It'd be even 
> more so if I could pry my wife's hands off of the PS2 long enough to 
> boot Linux on it. ;-)
> This probably will become a phenomenon in the future with some of the 
> game consoles out there, as they grow to include Ethernet, hard 
> drives, etc. -- assuming that Nintendo, Sony, etc. don't de-legitimize 
> the concept by using Microsoft's Xbox approach. The problem, though, 
> is still cost. I own several game consoles -- the original NES, 
> SuperNES, N64, a PS2, and my Dreamcast -- and the problem is that even 
> the relatively old ones, even on Ebay, are still not cheap enough to 
> mass-purchase. I mean, when the DC is still $50 and the BBA is $100, I 
> don't see any systems that could feasibly do this being cheap enough 
> for at least 5+ years.
> Of course, I'm still drooling over the concept of the PS3 and its cell 
> architecture -- but it'll be a long, long time before anyone could 
> afford to cluster that.
> Alex Kirk
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> If you're wondering about an odd attachment to this mail that you can't
> seem to open, it's my digital/cryptographic signature. It's like 
> signing
> a regular letter, only much tougher to forge. If you want to learn more
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> <mime-attachment>
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