what would you do with a small server farm?

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/17/1444246

  Quote

"I worked for an internet start-up last year and during the 'we have plenty of money' phase, a lot of server hardware was purchased. Eight months later, there is very little money, but we're still plugging along — using only a fraction of the hardware. We just cleared out a co-lo and I now have a stack of 17, 1U servers in my garage. Each of those has 2 servers, each of which is a 2-processor, dual-core box with 8 GB of RAM. Add that up and I have 136 processors and 272 GB of RAM with nothing to do. The IT guy in me thinks that's a waste of FLOPS. The wanna-be businessman in me thinks its probably a waste of money as well. So I've been brainstorming ways to put all of that power to good use. Any ideas?"

personally, i'd bullshit my way into getting a sweet grant/public funding, and dedicate a couple to routing and leave the rest 100% exposed to the open internets. maybe running IE with scripts to click fucking everything. and make a paper from it.

also i'd heat my house from the thermal output

the idea of a malware farm, realised in this manner fascinates me.

and yeah i know xkcd covered this.

  kaini said:

and yeah i know xkcd covered this.

You're one step ahead of me :laughing:

I'd use them to render ghost porn.

  mcbpete said:

I'd use them to render ghost porn.

hahaha, i was gonna say just "lots of 3d rendering" but you found the perfect application!

a customized linux kernel

designed for distributed computing

dedicated entirely to: "heat or night?"

run brute force attacks on CUP's password

i'd use it to run the world's most intense convolution reverb.

lol

"...and this is the reverb profile of... new york city. averaged."

i want to know what it'd sound like inside that 3D pipes screensaver that windows has.