Sorry if this is off-topic, but I was hoping I could draw on the combined
knowledge of people here.

Some of the people I'm working for are putting together a distributed
computing cluster.  As the manager of said cluster, I get to have a say in
what they buy.  Lots of details are getting sorted out, but one question
(in various forms) keeps cropping up:  How can we get the most computing
power per dollar?

We're primarily interested in floating point, so one suggestion has been a
bunch of MMX i386's.  But as far as I know, there's no compiler that
outputs MMX instructions for unix.  I've also looked at the G3 powermacs,
which are supposed to be fast, but I'm not convinced NetBSD/macppc is
stable enough yet. Other contenders include alpha and Sun boxes, running
NetBSD or a "native" OS.

Specifics of the machines above, I can get on my own; I'm just wondering
if there's anything else that I'm missing.  (You know, that 800 GFLOP
processor that costs 20 bucks.  :)

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Chris

-----------------------------------------------------cjones@math.montana.edu
Chris Jones                                          cjones@honors.montana.edu
           Mad scientist at large                    cjones@nervana.montana.edu
"Is this going to be a stand-up programming session, sir, or another bug hunt?"