-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- And I think your cost estimate is also too high. You're assuming $5000 per system, and that's way too high. You only need a power supply, a motherboard, a processor, a *tiny* amount of RAM, a network device of some sort (so you can netboot the systems), and probably a cheezeball display card; you can put one or two monitors on a cart if you *really* need one hooked up. You don't need a disk or disk controller -- it's just something else to break.. Prices selected by throwing darts at the August Computer Shopper. There are probably lower ones.. P120 motherboard + processor: $1099 P100 motherboard + processor: 666 case & power supply: $40 network card (10base2): $40 4MB memory: $160 VGA display card: $29 keyboard: $15 So, one could put together a P100 compute server for about $1000, and a P120 for about $1400.. the P100 is a better deal at this point. I suspect that with a little work, you could share power supplies between multiple motherboards, rack-mount the systems, share keyboards, etc. You might need a slightly more expensive LAN card for netbooting... That cuts your cost estimate down by a factor of about 3 or better, to around $350.00 I think your electricity estimate may be a bit low, but electricity is expensive where I live in the northeast U.S... - Bill -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQCVAwUBMDSrMrT+rHlVUGpxAQEbpAP/TIvDxLjfcdDdqhM5lIG9KEjeIFDWfgMF qk8RDE1PtAcYrq8SMjgrZ52KU7gf0t0QPs44ZGSC42ff5Z9gRpBGt7f7Qx8GUhPs 6kMVzmkwX9v0XLjcVC9Z/0f7diymWWfFXHW6HHTnYXseoRdmG3MBaDYWkFLiRQSh ddGscgV48tg= =ylld -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----