Maybe UK can have students work for pizza, but how much would it cost if you paid people to assemble KLAT2?
Although we had a lot of student help (30-40 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. 🙂 Even so, we estimate that it took less than 60 person-hours to put everything together. About 50 of those 60 hours were spent on building the PCs themselves. We could have bought the PCs pre-built at little or no extra cost, but building them ourself allowed us to get precisely what we wanted. For example, there was only one vendor for the cases (which we love!) that had the 300W power supply, but that vendor didn’t have everything else we wanted. Yeah, a 250W power supply would have worked too, and it would even have been a bit cheaper, but we got better stuff and the students got the experience of seeing firsthand how these things get put together. That said, keep in mind that our group has built LOTS of clusters sin
