title: setting up a distributed computing network
body: <p>I need a lot of computing power for a new scientific application I built.</p>
  
  <p>As I am on a budget, and since the app requires lots of CPU but little memory (400MB), a friend recommended that I buy many "old" machines (Pentium 4, 3Ghz, 1GB memory) and use them to run instances of my application (every app instance is independent of one another, and does a lot of computations and I\O).</p>
  
  <p>There are some stores that seem to offer such machines for cheap ($100 a piece). </p>
  
  <p>My question is, how hard would it be to install ubuntu linux on these machines, set it all up in a network and install things like python / cython on it?</p>
  
  <p>how hard would it be to install condor, so that I can just 'submit jobs' to a central node and the computations will be carried out in the various nodes / units? </p>