Old machine cluster for GCC compile/testing

[Laurent GUERBY <laurent at guerby dot net>]

Hi,

FSF France has received in donation 9 Dell poweredge 1550 bi processor
1U machines with one 18GB SCSI disk and 1GB RAM, processors total 19.5
GHz distributed as follows:

- 3 bi pentium III 1.25 GHz
- 6 bi pentium III 1.00 GHz

The machines are about four years old, so of course there may be
hardware problems in the coming years, but we might also be able
to get cheap parts on the used market (or from other donations).

An offer has been made for hosting those 9 1U machines in Paris provided
low use of external bandwidth, so this would be useable for a GCC
compile farm.

FSF France has to say yes or no to the hosting offer by friday 12Aug2005
17:00 UTC (end of this week), if we do not set up some
compile/compute-farm like project FSF France will allocate these
machines to other tasks. FYI 31 other machines of this type were also
donated and have been allocated to various projects.

So I'm asking for project proposals, that is to say people that think
that their volunteer time to work on these old machine (scripts,
compiling, ... under the limit of minimal external bandwidth use) is of
some significant benefit to some free software project. 

Project participants would get ssh access to the machines at
the beginning of september 2005.

The machines are currently installed with ubuntu 5.04, but this could
change if needed (and expertise provided).

Feel free to pass this offer to projects that are related to GCC, like
free software compiled with GCC that come with a useful test suite and
where volunteer are willing to help.

Discussions are welcome on this list.

Sincerely,

Laurent

PS: sorry for the short notice, I wasn't aware until recently that
there was a time limit on the hosting offer. We might be able
to get another hosting offer, but I prefer not count on it.