Re: Is beowulf cool and should I setup a bunch of old PCs to try it out?
- From: ray <ray@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 16 May 2007 07:35:32 -0600
On Wed, 16 May 2007 04:27:10 +0200, Ohmster wrote:
Okay, I admit it, I am a geek. I think that computers are totally cool and
that Linux kicks ass. I "front end" my home LAN with Fedora 6 and let it be
my firewall and router. I also run web and FTP servers from it and host
domains. Totally cool.
Because I have this "geek" thing going on, I have a bunch of outdated
computers at my disposal. People give them to me or I just pick them up
here and there. Right now, my system is Fedora 6 on a Pentium III, 800Mhz.,
with a gig and a half of SDRAM, a 200Mb hard drive, and an FX5500 video
card. Also have a Soundblaster AWE 64 Gold ISA that kicks ass in it. The
machine shines in all of it's glory with Beryl on Gnome and KDE. I have
webmen, usermin, samba, and putty setup to access the machine from my XP
computer or remotely. I am very happy with all of this.
What I want to know is what to do with all of these spare "throw away" PCs
that I know have all over the place. We are talking like Pentium I systems,
maybe 400Mhz or worse maybe. They have hard drives in them and they can run
Win98., but would they benefit me by clustering them with beowulf? What
does clustering do and how could or would or would not this be a benefit
and should I investigate this possibility further? Thanks for your input.
FWIW - there are several 'less heavy' desktops like XFCE or Enlightenment
that would run fine on 'older' equipment. I installed Elive on a P166 with
64mb last year and it runs decently.
I don't think it would be worth your effort (except for the learning
experience) to do a cluster. Number one reason is: in order for most
software to make much use of parallel processing (either mulitple
processors, multiple cores, or multiple computers) the code for the app
must be parallelized. In the case of a cluster, there is significant
overhead involved in the process communication.
.
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