digging into specs, i'm going to shuffle ram around to make a couple of 512mb ram nodes.

256mb of ram barely installs ubuntu server and opensshd.

it runs great, install was SLOW.

At this point, I'm going with https://www.mpich.org/static/downloads/3.1.4/mpich-3.1.4-installguide.pdf something along these lines. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MpichCluster looks like something i might be able to pull off.

I'm going to work with just ubuntu server and mpich as a start. following that, once it's confirmed that I have a working cluster, we need to benchmark it.

this batch of machines were in various states of runs or doesn't... so I'm going to monkey around with them until I get at least 3 working nodes. I may ditch doubling the ram per node in the end, we'll see...

BONUS! several of these have halfway decent ethernet cards in them.

LINPACK? what is this...? *staggers off into the night*