"The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has assembled a supercomputer from an army of Sony PlayStation 2's."
I can just imagine how a request for 100 SonyPlaystations would go down with our current school administration :)
Comments
Convincing the unitiated
What a great project. Unfortunately it will be seen as a gimmick by people who don't realise that (a) a Playstation is, in fact, just a computer and (b) as such, can be programmed to run a Linux kernel. I wonder if more publicity concerning ported and embedded Linux (it's all around us!) could aid the Linux/OSS cause?
Savings potential
wrt administrations, I suspect that if you point out that PS2's clock in at AUD400 per unit, whereas a decent new PC would be in the AUD1000-2000 range, you might get some attention.... Oh, that's without bulk buying savings.
As for ported/embedded Linux, agreed that publicity would raise image, but it might take some doing -- some of the concepts are rather esoteric. At the end of the day, I suspect that the barrier is the desktop. No matter how many times you tell people that the internet runs on *nix, that most servers around the place are *nix, that OSS is good, etc etc, the relevance is not there for them. The question that needs to be answered for conventional PC users such as policy makers etc, is: how does this affect MY life wrt computing? Iow, I think that persuading people of Linux goodness would be easier with a tangible demonstration, which takes us back to the desktop.
I don't think the desktop is where Linux can do the most good, since other systems provide comparable performance for basic tasks. But it is at that interface that people will be convinced that Linux is a contender; proving that it's superior in more advanced computing tasks (eg file serving) would be relatively straightforward to a sympathetic audience.
I feel better now....