Re: [Condor-users] Condor on Xbox??

[Erik Paulson <epaulson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 04:24:10PM -0600, gregg.cooke@xxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> Has anyone ever tried to run Condor on a Linux-powered Xbox?
> 

It should just basically work - it's just an Intel Linux. I'm not 
aware of anyone who's tried to run Condor on it though.


> I noticed that the going price for an old Xbox on eBay is $40...for the
> price of a cheap server ($2000) I could create a 50-node Xbox grid....

"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use: Two strong oxen or 
1024 chickens?" -- Seymour Cray

Don't forget about the cost of a modchip to get it to boot Linux, and the
power to run 50 Xboxes.

> 
> Xbox has some limitations though, mainly memory.  But

That's the killer - 64 megs of RAM isn't much. But, if your app is CPU bound
and has a small memory footprint, then it might make sense.

NCSA a few years back did something similiar with the Playstation 2.
http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/

It only has 32 megs of RAM - but they were running a computation chemistry
app on it that didn't need the RAM and used the vector engine on the
PS2, and got like 150MFLOPS out of it - our 2.8Ghz Xeons get about 1GFlop,
so you can quickly catch up.

-Erik