budget supercomputer project

[Maddyjohn]

I'm not sure if this belongs here, so please point it out if there's a more appropriate sub for this.

My school will be decommissioning and throwing out lots of identical Optiplex 790 systems (i5-2400, 2x2GB DDR3, 500GB HDD) in December, and instead of letting them going to waste, the computer society (of which I am a member of) obtained permission to keep several of them for "R&D". I had the idea of linking them up together to form some sort of extremely basic supercomputer just for the fun of it, but I have no idea how practical or realistic this is. Some questions:

On a scale of ten, how practical or realistic is this? How so?

What software can be used to link the nodes up and parallelize the tasks?

Which linux distro is preferred?

Is a managed switch required?

Mod edit: removed dodgy links

[ideus]

The comm hardware may outweigh the benefit of getting old computers to build the parallel computing network. Besides, only the software written to take advantage of the multiprocessing and multi-thread environment may take advantage of it. Linux is the only way to go software wise. Keep us posted on your project's progress.
One more thing, you should want to move your post to the board of Making stuff together.

[Tactile]

Reaearch "beowulf cluster" and you'll find lots of info.

[M3SS3NG3R]

You should first educate yourself a bit on the theory of distributed systems. I can personally recommend the course "Cloud Computing Concepts" on Coursera taught by UIUC professor Indy Gupta. After you have some fundamental understandings of how distributed systems work and how you can leverage them for parallel computation, look into setting up a multi-node system. There are ready-made images that will provide a lot of the industry standard softwares/libraries etc that are currently in use. Hortonworks HDP and Cloudera come to mind.

[yui]

Quite a few peoples did it with raspberry pi and very simple unmanaged switches (EVVBlog did one when the pi plus came out), as for the power of the beast, electrically it will use a lot of it but you will most likely not get even to the level of a modern gaming rig.
so for the fun of it yeah go for it especially if you have all the hardware at your disposal but don't expect top 10 supercalculator power with that setup.
And yeah linux is pretty much the only way to go
Found that after 5 minutes of google-fu : https://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/how-to-build-a-powerful-distributed-computer-515197