Company computer utilization?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, 17 Jul 2002, Lambe, Dave wrote:

> What about some type of "grid" computing similar to SETI? It would only need
> a client installed that could be configured to run when the PC had been idle
> for "X" minutes/hours and would SURELY be simpler to implement than

Where does this SURELY come from? SURELY, there must be a reason for this
SURELY? cron and windows gives plenty of hits on Google, similiarly
reboot.exe. Crontab on *nix side running a script changing the bootmanager
and the rebooting is equally a thing of minutes.

Embarassingly parallel applications are not what Beowulfs are designed
for, and if we're talking about low-latency high-bandwidth high QoS
network traffic then it is quite obvious why Redmond systems don't figure
in a Beowulf.

> re-loading "100's of P4 and P4 Xeon boxes". The later is surely to irk
> someone with stroke to get the whole project kinked.

Either this is a part of the corporate policy thing, backed by the
management, or it isn't. If this is prototyping strictly, you better make
sure the users know that the box will be automatically rebooted after 
office hours.