James Lelyveld's Blog

I was looking at the mass of aging computers in my flat the other day and thinking there must be a better use for them, I’ve currently got a Pentium 3 currently running Ubuntu & a G4 (currently on loan to my sister) as well as 2 work laptops and a Sony Vaio, a somewhat excessive amount of kit.

At the moment the pentium is only used for scanning (as I’ve and old scanner and it doesn’t have drivers Vista or Mac OSX. It’s not really an issue for me at the moment but I can see when I want to upgrade next time I’ve got to decide what to do with some of this kit.

The idea I had was to run them as a grid where the most powerful machine has control of the other’s processors etc and can balance the load to optimise performance. Linux seems to be the ideal platform for this as it can be very small.

So …. great idea, I thought – I ran it past a couple of my Coleagues at work (Jeremy, Anton & Andrew – Thank you).

The feedback was that it’s not worth running as a grid as the computational power to manage it would negate any benefits, better solutions suggested were to user them as Firewalls, Routers or for running house telemetry. I then did a bit of digging on the web and I’m definitely not the first person to have thought about this, (have a look here for starters).

From what all I’ve looked at the best solution for old computers is to donate them – there are a lot of charities asking for them to donate to underprivaledged kids. This is going to be what I do when I next upgrade (after wiping the hard drives….)