Francisca O. Oladipo^1,, Christogonus C. Madu¹, Christopher C. Okoro¹

Several discarded hardware computers littered the storage rooms and all available open spaces of the Computer Science Department Laboratory at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka campus; these computers constitute electronic wastes (e-wastes) and dissipate mercury, cadmium and other chemical compounds that are injurious to human and animals. In addition to the health implications of these discarded products, substantial amount of revenue is committed to system upgrade through purchasing new hardware to replace the discarded ones as a result of the need for high performing systems. This work is focused on eliminating e-wastes in our laboratories and offices by leveraging on open source software to test for the feasibility of building high performance computers from these discarded hardware. A prototype cluster consisting of 10 discarded computers were designed to run on freely available Mandriva Enterprise Server, LINUX OS, Red Hat 9.0 as operating systems; MySql Server for the database management and tested with a simulated VOIP application. The cluster provided high performance computing power that can be used for intensive research as the processing powers of the constituent computers were combined to provide web and database servers as well as load balancers.

e-waste, clusters, Load Balancing, Open Source Software, clusters