Build Your Own ClusterMonkey

(For the Geeks out there. And we are out there, believe me.... Thanks Arthur.)

So in ten years the amount of computing power that cost IBM five million dollars can be assembled for... $1,256. And dropping in price as I write this.

You can (I am for a navigationally-challenged son) buy a touch screen GPS navigation system for $300 that:

(a) has color maps of every city and highway in the US and Canada built into it
(b) will track your travel and tell you verbally when to turn and the name of the street to turn on
(c) has a bluetooth wireless connection so you can link a cell phone to it for hands-free talking
(d) has an MP3 player built in, just because they had some extra storage

I know something about tech stuff because I took two half-years off from work to volunteer in my kid's school to help build the technology programs there, which lousy public funding had starved. We got hundreds of computers donated and constructed school-wide networks in three locations. All very educational. And everything I learned is obsolete, six years later.

But I learned some curious facts. Boys are currently better typists than girls. Why? because they do more game playing and online communicating by IM and other quick communications. One of my boys sent and received 1200 text messages in one month. By contrast, girls tend to talk to each other to a greater extent, which develops their keyboarding skills to a lesser degree.
Now it seems quite possible that elementary school kids in a surprisingly short period of time could find a supercomputer under their Christmas tree. I can't even imagine the possible uses of that much computing power, but my best guess is that the first application will be a really, really astounding computer game.

One other section in this article caught my eye:

Large computer clusters that act as one system are used today to drive the most data-intensive applications. Those systems, which are more than 100 times faster than Microwulf, are used by the National Weather Service to process meteorological data and by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency to simulate nuclear tests.

So... by linking a hundred of these discount puppies together, for a parts cost of about $14,000, one in theory could construct a computer cluster as powerful as those used to model weather data, apparently one of the more complicated computing challenges? I hope that potential for widely-distributed computing power is used for something worthwhile. Another good reason, if one was needed, to elect an intelligent President.

And here's how to build one.

Arthur