Cluster pt 1. Hardware

For many years I wanted to have a cluster. Mostly for the challenge of setting it up, but also to learn about what kinds of applications work best in a clustered environment.I started with a group of identical 486 boxes purchased from Laclede Computer Trading. These were adequate machines to learn to build with, but I quickly outstripped them, mostly because the OS'es dont support the old hardware they have. That turns out to be a real pity, and I always thought that that was an advantage that Linux had - it would support old hardware longer than other OS'es would. It turns out that if you use a mainstream linux distro, you're locking yourself out of alot of options that could give the hobbyist an advantage - mostly price.These days, I have five pentium III nodes each with 128 MB Ram. Not much but I'm not really going for performance, I want to see the cluster work, if we build a useful applicaiton, then we put more memory in there.My office donated four more machines to me, so soon I'll have nine nodes.There are disadvantages to having a heterogeneous farm of machines - mostly that you need to have all the drivers for each node included in the kernel, and orchestrating that is a hassle.