On: AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Compu...

[wtracy]

I wonder how hard it would be to copy this with old PC boards. Given how non-standard PC hardware is, I guess you'd have to know what motherboard you've got before you can start trying to mod it to network boot.

It looks like Coreboot doesn't support any boards older than the Pentium II timeframe.

[rbanffy → wtracy]

I think this looks a lot like the Apple II-based one:

http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/

It's lacking style, IMHO. A PC will never, ever match an Apple II in that ;-)

[zokier → wtracy]

Look up PXE, many systems already support booting from network. If necessary, you could add a PXE NIC to the machines.

[wtracy → zokier]

I figured I'd be dredging up hardware old enough to not support PXE. If it's possible to add a PXE NIC and boot off the network without a PXE-enabled BIOS, that is both news to me and very cool.

[wtracy → wtracy]

On second thought what someone needs to do: Build one of these out of Beagleboards! :-D