[Openuserful-general] Userful for PlayaInfo at Burning Man 2010

[Jeffrey J. <ort...@gm...>]

Hi Folks,

I have just returned from Burning Man 2009 (burningman.com) and our
web app project (earth.burningman.com) was co-opted at the last minute
to run on a bank of 30 terminals used by burning man participants
during the event. Approx 8000 people registered and used the app
during the week, and there was often a line 100+ deep to use the
terminals. There were numerous 'problems' and many 'triumphs', but the
main issue as I see it, was keeping all the terminals running
sucessfully. Each was its own hard-driveless pc booted from a live-cd
of ubuntu or knoppix.

Some (grainy, damn the dust in my iPhone lens) photos here ...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ortelius/3902049183/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ortelius/3902047085/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ortelius/3902052969/

For next year, I have been tasked with improving this mess and the
first major step I would like to take is to consolidate the terminals
onto as few physical machines as possible, and increase the number of
user terminals to 50 if possible all with a minimal budget.

So, I would like to solicit advice from this list on setting up a 50
instance userful multiplier setup. Is it possible to actually run 50
(maybe 32 max?) terminals from one VERY large server with a 16x PCI
port replicator like this
http://www.cyclone.com/products/expansion_backplanes/pcie412403.php
with 16 dual head cards in it? If not, what would be the minimum
number of machines required to do 50 terminals, and how would one go
about this?

Thanks in advance?

Jeff