On Mon, 15 Aug 2005, Jim Crumley wrote: > By the way, if you get to the point where you need very heavy-duty > computing power, then you should take a look at applying for time at the > Minnesota Supercomputer Institute - http://www.msi.umn.edu/. Using their > resources is much easier than building your own cluster, though I am not > sure how their programs would fit with your needs. I have accounts on at least five of their machines. We are using them all the time. I use a Linux machine to connect (SSH) to the MSI machines and I use VNC to connect to the Linux machine (w/ either SSH tunnel or Enterprise VNC with encryption). I want a little more power on the Linux machine partly because MSI machines are not really fast though they have lots of memory and many processors available. Also, interactive jobs really should not be run on the MSI machines. Thanks for all the other tips about Debian. Debian still might be the way for me to go. I'll be pondering the distro issue for a few days. Mike