Re: Interfacing GALib to Swarm

[John W. Fondon III (Trey)]

>>
>> 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?
>

Dr. Box,
        Not only SWARM and the kernel, but also the code which will
evaluate  fitness (of course, this can always be shipped over to the server
if that is more efficient).

I fairly certain this is the most cost effective way to tackle a hard
problem that lends itself to distributed computing...

I've priced out a 2 generation removed pentium/mb/netcard  and it's
amazingly cheap when you compare cycles/second to alpha systems -  a biggie
that I have not resolved yet is RAM/cache (this will depend on SWARM and my
problem).  But I really think SWARM is the way to go as long as it will not
have any fundamental conflicts with this type of computing scheme...




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