From ClusterXMany people have asked us "Why?" well that answer comes in many forms. All the members of ClusterX have found themselves wondering about the power of an Xbox. As we all know the Xbox is virtually a small desktop computer and as such can handle many tasks with a much smaller footprint.


A couple members of ClusterX were or are Computer Science majors at a local college and looking back we recalled a request for computers to teach our group about the wonders of parallel processing. When our dreams were shot down by the financial Scrooges within the university we thought this dream was over, but were they? Why should the high school students and college students of today suffer when they want to learn a trade that has been so open for so long? Why must the students of tomorrow give up this small piece of education because institutions say we don't have the money, yet increase tuition on a semester by semester basis? Well look to reality we did. We found a way not only to have some fun, but bring a service to the students of tomorrow. We are showing that you do not need a super 1500 CPU cluster to learn from. You do not need large amounts of money to bring into your own home a personal satisfaction that you did it yourself. We want to share with those same high schools and colleges that they can give students this same experience at a fraction of the cost.

Yet, we have alternative reasons as well. The evil side, the dark side, and the side no one wants to see. Ok! Ok! There is no evil or dark side to this, it is just simply fun to see how many we can get together and make work. We are hoping to strike in interest in others and maybe have some sort of growth among Xbox fans to built even bigger clusters. Have you seen the Playstation 2 Cluster? Well it is a total over 70 nodes in size, has about ½ the CPU power of an Xbox and ½ the memory. I figure we the Xbox clustering people of the world can show another university that they spent WAY too much money for what they produced. I figure with 35 Xbox's we will have close to or equal to the computing power of that 70 node Playstation 2 cluster. What if we went on to create a 70 node Xbox cluster? Where does it stop? What can we do? It's Alive! It's Alive! No its not but when will it stop, well once we reach a point where we feel its no longer fun then we may donate portions of the cluster to local high schools, sell on eBay, give to the needy, who knows, who cares that way to far to think about. We just want to have fun and learn while we are at it.

So what's the biggest reason for building a cluster, well to be honest just to see if we could build it. Why not give us your suggestions on what to do after we are moving along and programming becomes a bore. Drop us an email at suggestions@clusterx.org, keeping in mind that if you tell us to do anything stupid like DoS Microsoft IT WON'T HAPPEN. We are not here hurt anyone or any company, we are here to teach others, learn ourselves, and most of all have fun doing this project.

Thanks,
ClusterX Team

Current Number Of Nodes: (12) w/1 being a development node Source: ClusterX