Re: Interfacing GALib to Swarm

[Dr. Paul Box]

> 
> From: "John W. Fondon III (Trey" <address@hidden>
> Subject: Re: Interfacing GALib to Swarm

 [stuff deleted...]

> BTW, this reminds me of a question I have that is not (exactly) related:
> What is the minimal system upon which SWARM can be executed?
> I'm planning on stacking up cheap pentium motherboards, sharing a single
> disk, monitor, etc.
> Is this feasible?
> 
> Trey
 
A friend of mine in graduate school had a similar setup worked out, with some 
important differences:  he was not using swarm, and he was stacking 386 and 486 
boards (really cheap) rather than pentiums.  He was using the setup for genetic 
algorithms for optimization problems in physics, and wished to have several 
processors working on the problem in parallel.

Each board simply had a cpu, 4 or 8 M RAM, and a network card.  Each board 
booted through its network card, started the appropriate daemons, and waited 
for 
instructions from the server (the sole pentium) to work on portions of the 
problem.  All communication was done via TCP/IP between boards.  The minimum 
requirements for each board were those required for a minimal linux kernel 
configuration, a few daemons, and preferably no swap space.   

I have never bothered to find out what the minimum configuration would be to 
have such a board running a linux kernel and a swarm process.  Is it much more 
than is required for just a linux kernel?


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