On 3 Feb 2002, Cees van de Griend wrote:
The so called cluster size, the number of slaves, can vary. IIRC the NASA has a (Linux) Beowulf cluster of more than 1000 PC's.
Google.com also runs on a cluster of thousands (IIRC, 3000) of PC's. The advantages of PC's and Linux are very evident and they complement each other. Both are cheap (monetary-wise), flexible, and powerful. These characteristics are essential to those needing huge amounts of processing power. This is why Linux has caught on immensly in the filming industry. While workstations used to create special effects usually are "big iron" Unix machines (e.g., Irix on a SGI), rendering farms (those used for many major motion pictures such as _Titanic_ and _Lord of the Rings_) primarly use a large numbers of Linux running on cheap-ass IA32 machines. I remember reading an article where the producers chose Linux for rendering scenes in _Lord of the Rings_ because it had a price / performance ratio of 2:1 compared to anything else. -- Karol Pietrzak PGP KeyID: 3A1446A0