Building a cluster

[gullyg]

Hi,
Not sure if this in the correct place, but here goes.

I've been offered a number (up to 15) of damaged samsung q45 laptops very cheap, the specs (roughtly) are as follows,

Intel C2D at 1.8ghz
2gb DDR
No HDD (Stripped for parts)
No Optical (stripped for parts)
Damaged monitor (the reason they're going cheap)
Intel WiFi (can't remember chipset but it's well supported)
100base networking (can't remember chipset but it works under linux)
Decent to poor batteries (Woohoo - no need to UPS )

I was considering clustering them with the built-in ethernet to produce a system I could off load heavy work onto (encoding DVDs, music, software compilation etc).

I was thinking of using OpenMosix but it seems to have bit the dust. I understand transcode can cluster on it's own but I was looking for something more on the OS level so I didn't have to worry about which App is "clusterable".

Does anyone have any suggestions? Also does anyone know if the lack of Gigabit networking will hurt performance?

Many thanks
Iain
_________________
Not Y3K compliant

CPCFF

[nwmcsween]

openssi is the new openmosix

[gullyg]

Many thanks
_________________
Not Y3K compliant

CPCFF

[melbaum]

On the sourceforge site the last stable release was in early 2005, and the latest development release is for Fedora 3. This seems a bad sign. Does anyone know if the project is active, and if it's been adapted successfully to a Gentoo distribution for "real" high-performance computing use?