Re: the benifits
On Sat, 7 Jul 2001, Matt Fair wrote:
> I was thinking, if you were to have 2 100 MHZ computers, would it
> perform just as good as a 200 MHZ, or is there performance increase due
> to having multiple processors? On a large scale, would it be worth
> having 200 100 MHZ computers, or would I just be wasting floor space and
> should get a better processor to use in a cluster?
> I have not put together any clusters before, but I was just wondering if
> people have thought about this and tested it.
It depends on your problem. If you're trying something "simple", like
factoring or cracking passwords by brute force, then having the
additional computers doesn't slow you down much. But usually the
communication required between the computers is a limiting factor. If
you've got twice the number of computers, then network communications
will be more frequent, and this is slow.
Consider also the other expenses:
You must buy additional network equipment, power supplies, floor space,
air conditioning, electricity, and maintenance crew (you just doubled
the frequency of hardware faults).
So I think in general you want to buy the best commodity CPU you can
afford.
Damian Menscher
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