Building a clustered Supercomputer

[CyberNerd]

I've been running an extended schools ICT club this year, we've mostly been recycling old p233's and the like. Today the conversation got onto really powerful computers and I somewhat naively suggested that we turn all the schools' curriculum desktops into a giant supercomputer, kids seemed to like this idea

I looked into this a while back for the purpose of running thin client system where the client is a 'distributed server' - but this had a major disadvantage that if a client rebooted it could crash another users application on the 'server'.
Other than the obvious nuclear weapons simulations (I'm no physicist!) does anybody have any practical applications for this ? something that is easy to set up and might get the kids interested ? They suggested building a gaming server, but we'd have RBC firewall issues, licensing problems etc.

As a platform clusterknoppix springs to mind but it hasn't been updated since 2004, any other PXE suggestions would be appreciated, ideally distros as I don't want to spend too much time on this.
I was planning on PXE booting as this would be easy for us (we boot thinstation to run citrix)

[ajbritton]

Any use... http://pietschsoft.com/Blog/Post.aspx?PostID=174

[CyberNerd]

Thanks, The miniITX cluster looks nice, but looks like they set up their own BSD for it .
I' just found parallelknoppix which looks pretty simple to set up and nicely documented
Probably we'll just use one IT suite to begin with - 30 1GHz machines - still not sure what do do with the cluster though...

[ajbritton]

Also found these which look interesting...

Beowolf

Cluster Monkey

[kylewilliamson]

We've given 'mosix' a go with some of the kids.

[linuxgirlie]

One of the 6th formers did a beowulf for open evening and it worked well and impressed the parents ....lol

[CyberNerd]

Thanks for all the suggestions, I did the lesson yesterday and it went quite well. We booted up 28 thin clients to build one large cluster. I wasn't able to demonstrate anything running on it, but I think I got the point about clustering across. Need to decide what to build next week...

[Teth]

I have also done this for an open night demo. Had half the machines in the 2 most up to date ICT suites (so kids could play on the other half) + the old ICT suite we don't like to let them near running Folding at home and Seti @ home on knoppix + mosix build I found in a link on Digg once. All booted from CD and using a couple of shares on the fileserver for storage needs. It ripped through work units at a great rate. The @home type apps are a great demo for it because they have a bit of graphical output and they're completely floating point bound.

[alonebfg]

i know this is a bit of the subject but have we (edugeek got a folding at home team. If not do we want one i have been doing it for a while but have not really been in a team. will post in here