Linux clusters for genetic algorithms

[Michael Costolo]

A colleage of mine and I are considering building and using a Beowulf cluster of
Linux computers to work on various problems using genetic algorithms.  I am trying
to understand the feasibility of this approach.  As I am still in the early stages
of learning about cluster computing, please pardon my ignorance.  Our concerns are
computational power, cost, and ease of programming.  Any input would be greatly
appreciated.

Preliminarily, we believe we can reasonably afford to build a 10 node/10 processor
cluster using AMD XP1700+ chips (~1.4 GHz), each having 1 GB of RAM (on the
motherboard).  Is this too small of a cluster to bother with?

We already have a fair amount of C code written for single processor computers.  My
understanding is that this code would need to be "parallelized" in order to run on a
cluster.  Can this be done with a parellelizing compiler or must we re-write the
code to work with PVM or MPI (for example)?  Does any one have any experience or
suggestions they might be willing to offer?  (My colleage mentioned having to rework
code for multiple processors in the past and apparently it was rather time
consuming.)

Can anyone suggest good reference material for building such machines?  (I know
someone had a do-not-buy Linux cluster book suggestion earlier).

Again, any input is appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

-Mike-

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