Maybe UK can have students work for pizza, but how much would it cost if you paid people to assemble KASY0?
Although we had a lot of student help (over 50 people total), the point of that was getting lots of people involved in the technology, not really that we needed tons of cheap labor. After all, we are a University — we’re supposed to be inspiring and teaching students. 🙂 Aside from that, building your own systems implies higher shipping costs, and this cost alone pretty much cancels any cost savings from assembling your own. That said, keep in mind that our group has built LOTS of clusters since February 1994. If you are building your first, it will take you longer. There are a lot of tricks we’ve learned. Even stupid things like assembling the shelving units can take hours if you get the wrong kind of sheving; having wheels on the shelves also saved us more than a few hours because things didn’t have to be assembled in place.
