Lately I have been researching "transputers" which were basically ISA boards with an i860 or T800 CPU that you could plug into your machine to turn it into a parallel processing computer.
The "LART" is a pretty nifty ARM based SBC, very small, low power, which one can download the schematics for it and its kitchen sink board which has ethernet.
Now, if you could take a cheap ethernet card, and hook the output of the LART into it, and screw the LART onto the ethercard, you would basically have a very tiny "beowulf-style" PCI transputer card, with your host machine being an active PCI backplane host. Maybe use a Compact Flash card for the LART's hard drive and make it poke out of the slot?
Personally, I have I think 4 empty PCI slots. Adding 4 StrongARM processors would be great... imagine how my Distributed.Net stats would shoot up!
Ok, well maybe this is kind-of a niche luxury thing with limited practicality, but I know that tons of people would shell out cash for something like this. "DIY Parallel Supercomputer" etc.
Even better would be to integrate a LART onto a PCI board that acts like an ethercard. Just telnet, etc., to it.
You guys better not steal my ideas or I'll be ... well, actually, never mind ... Cool Idea (c) B. Douglas Hilton 2002 this idea is released under the GNU General Public License and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, see http://www.gnu.org for the full details :-) If you use this idea in your derived idea you must tell others about this idea and provide the source thoughts for your idea :-)
Any computer engineers out there? I've just handed you a money-maker! Run with it!
- Doug
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