LinuxPlanet: Your Friendly Neighborhood Supercomputer

“The best financial advice that can be offered in any ecomonic
climate is this: make your money work for you instead of you
working for your money. Of course, making that work in real life is
always a significant challenge. Using all the resources you possess
can indeed be tricky–especially if you are not totally aware of
the resources available to you.

“Gateway Computers had an interesting problem with their
resources. Sitting around their 272 retail stores were nearly 8,000
demonstration PCs, all running Windows something-or-other, churning
away screensavers until a potential customer came along and
test-drove the machine. But, in between all of those little
point-and-click sessions, these machines were essentially doing
nothing.

“Having 8,000 computers sitting around doing nothing is a lot of
overhead, both fiscally and computationally. All of these machines
are top-of-the line (all the better for demos) and networked
together into a company-wide WAN. But other than putting out heat,
what could be done with these idle PCs…?”

Complete
Story