Home » forums » General and Miscellaneous Forums » State of the Computing World

Desktop clusters

Tags:

Hi All,

I was just wondering if it’s already been taught off or if there are implementation of converting desktop to a cluster with 2 or more PC's. I understand clustering is used for large computations which usually doesn’t require intervention, and once done you get the final output(layman terms). What I was think was if is it possible to say a Debian OS with all front -end on one PC and rest of all background process to be run from a second PC (I know there might be lot of ifs… here) and together to be treated as cluster. So to have a better performance and to make some use of older hardware.

Just a bit of my background, I have Postgraduate degree in Network and Distributed computing and done parallel programming so I know what I am talking :) (for those extra terrestrial thinkers)

Regards,

Bookmark/Search this post with:
  • Delicious
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • Propeller
  • Reddit
  • Magnoliacom
  • Newsvine
  • Furl
  • Google
  • Yahoo
  • Technorati
0
‹ Ultimately Cool Piracy funds terror attacks ›

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Re: Desktop clusters

Submitted by 1 on Mon, 2008-04-07 10:41.

I can't be specific since it is not my personal experience, but an acquaintance of mine made a cluster of some junk PCs, i think eight of them. And that's the end of the story. You just need to figure out the way now :-). I can only think that this should not be a problem because Debian was already used in cluster configurations and software should provide a level of abstraction over the hardware - meaning that you would probably need use similar technique (just the results would be worse than for some fancy high-end machines). Hey, now I remember, somebody also made a "Familiar" based cluster of 10 iPaqs and got a performance of an pentium II or III some years ago, I think.

»

Re: Desktop clusters

Submitted by jaclon on Tue, 2008-04-08 22:29.

July 16, 2007 1:46 PM PDT
OpenMosix pulls the plug
Posted by Stephen Shankland

OpenMosix, an open-source project to run software across a group of computers, will shut down on March 1.

Moshe Bar, who launched and led the project, announced the move Sunday on the OpenMosix project Web site. Bar more recently has been involved in two virtualization projects--first Xen and later KVM--that have the potential to achieve some of what OpenMosix could have enabled, a computing infrastructure that can flexibly adjust to changing work demands by shifting running software from one physical machine to another.

"The increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (SSI) clustering less of a factor in computing. The direction of computing is clear, and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects," Bar said about the OpenMosix closure.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9745228-7.html

»
Syndicate content