Big BLU Sper Computer

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| I'm not sure which John you're referring to. If you meant me, then no,=20
| I have no room in my house, nor could I afford the operational costs=20
| of something like this even if I did have sufficient space.=20

I think that was me.  I've been thinking for some time that I  should
use  the  handful of "obsolete" PCs inour basement to learn something
about clustering and such. Of course, it would be more useful to have
more machines.

OTOH, I'm not at all sure of the economics of such things.   I  don't
really  know  how  to  accurately  calculate  the  cost  of running a
machine.  Yeah, the cost per KW-hour  is  just  a  number,  but  that
doesn't make it easy to figure out the actual cost.

Maybe I should get one of those gadgets that gives long-term data  on
how  much  power  an appliance is using.  Then I could figure out how
much my current boxes actually cost to run.  I wonder which of  these
meters  gives  useful  data?  There seems to be an order-of-magnitude
range of prices, with somewhat vague descriptions of what they do.