Super computer?

[alexh92]

I have recently been made redundant from a medium sized eLearning Training Centre.  I was a Workskills and basic IT Tutor there.  The boss of the company has said we can buy the computers off him at a very reasonable price if we can think of something to do with them.  There are 220 fairly new PCs, a mix of between months and 3 years old.

 

Two questions:

1.  Could we build these computers into a networked Supercomputer with a presence on the Internet?

2.  Any ideas for what we could use the Supercomputer for to make some money?

 

Any ideas gratefully received.  Or if you want to get involved with us we are based in Birmingham in the UK.  Thanks.

[camerongray]

Technically this would be a "cluster" not a "supercomputer" which may help you in your search.

You certainly can do this using software such as Beowulf (for scientific processing) or Hadoop (for data processing).  However, the only way I can think of making money from this sort of thing would be if you were to rent space out on the cluster, but then you would be trying to compete with companies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure where you could also set up a cluster.  If you could figure out pricing to make this competitive then it could certainly work though.

However, there is one tricky part you will need to figure out - Power and cooling.  Having 220 machines sitting running at 100% load for hours/days on end is going to pull a lot of power and generate a lot of heat, you would need to be investing in proper power distribution and cooling systems - You'd struggle to have this in a standard home/office environment without these modifications.

If you think of the average machine maybe pulling 200w at full CPU load, you are looking at pulling 44kw of power - Imagine running 22 electric room heaters all together, that's the power and heat you'd be dealing with!  You can rent space in proper datacenters which would have the power supplies and cooling to be able to handle this but it won't come cheap!

[DaveLembke]

There are 220 fairly new PCs, a mix of between months and 3 years old.

If these systems were cheap systems to begin with, making them into a cluster of combined processing power might not be very realistic.

What is the weakest system specs and what is the most powerful system spec system?

*Usually its more operating cost effective to have 1 powerful power hungry system that is as powerful as 10 lower end (green) systems when setting up clusters because the heat and power consumption of the 10 green systems exceeds that of the total power consumption of the 1 powerful system. If you already had these systems and you are trying to increase data processing power at the only increase in cost being electricity consumption, a cluster could be a means to load balance and process data faster through combined computing. Setting up a cluster can be very tricky. Going into a project like this with no real direction is not advised. You will need someone who has set up clusters before and can tailor software to work with a cluster. Additionally you will need a very well set up network with gigabit or faster communications to get the most of this. With 220 systems you might want to split these up into a group of clusters vs a single cluster as for the size of the cluster itself could slow performance by additional communications on the same cluster lan. In all clusters I have worked on I have had a minimum of 2 network adapters.