Linux cluster?

[Sami]

I have a bunch of older P3's and AMD Athlons running Linux. Any free software out there that would allow me to parallelise programs?

[AbecX]

I've set one up one before for a proof of concept. The thing I learned is if you're going to actually use these, what situtation are you going to put them in because there is different clusting apps for different scenarios. If you just want to play around, I definatly recommend openmosix. It was very simple for me to figure out and setup, in the end I had a redhat image that would do everthing, all you did was pop in a floppy and it would do the entire installation using kickstart and then install the openmosix stuff with a shell script ( they were all matching hardware ). The one cool thing that I liked about OM was that its decentralized, you can be on any of the computers and if you start using to much cpu/memory, it will start using someone elses cpu/memory over the network, kinda of like the borg.

http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/

[Sami]

I was looking at OpenMOSIX and OpenSSI but haven't good as far as to decide which one to install. The important thing for me would be the ability to run one program on multiple machines. Some of the cluster softwares don't do this, they will enable you to run one single program on the cluster but that program will run completely on one machine. Which one is OpenMOSIX? Did you get this far with it yet?

Running video editing software on Linux cluster with the old computers would be nice...

[AbecX]

When you say running video processing would be nice, do you mean like encoding dvd's to divx perhaps? The way openmosix is setup, is if the box you are on is getting smashed, it will start looking around for other computers that are not getting beat up and will use their resrouces, if you are just opening an mp3 or something, its not going to care.

What you'll want is a centralized cluster, one that has a master machine that tells all the slave machines what to do.

OH an one more thing, if you have 40 200mhz machines, its not going to run 8GHz, it'll be more like 5 or 6 under full load.

[Sami]

AVI editing from DV camcorder, DVD mastering etc.

I also have Far Cry server running on 450MHz machine and it tops the CPU to 99% when more than 6 are connected, it would be nice to have 2 or 3 running that server. Something tells me thought that 450MHz should be enough for a game server.

[AbecX]

[QUOTE=Sami]AVI editing from DV camcorder, DVD mastering etc.

I also have Far Cry server running on 450MHz machine and it tops the CPU to 99% when more than 6 are connected, it would be nice to have 2 or 3 running that server. Something tells me thought that 450MHz should be enough for a game server.[/QUOTE]
Doing video editing really is more video card and memory intensive, I dont think it will help out as much by sharing the load out. Honestly clustering is only worth it if you're doing number crunching, trying to send out all the data from your single 100mb connection to 10 other computers ( that meants 10mb to all the pc's ) just isnt worth it, by the time they get the load and send it back, your computer has already done the work. Now if you are going to be encoding or some other cpu intensive work, then hell yeah you'll notice a big increase.

I wish I could help you on Far Cry, is it a windows or linux box? I used to run counterstrike on a 600mhz, and it had no issues with 12 people connecting.

[Sami]

Server is running on Linux, game itself on Windows. Video editing, the part of the encoding and decoding itself is very CPU intense and doesn't really load the VPU at all.

[Sami]

I guess this means a no-go for openMosix:

"OpenMosix, like an SMP system, cannot execute a single process on multiple physical CPUs at the same time. This means that openMosix won't be able to speed up a single process such as Mozilla, except to migrate it to a node where it can execute most efficiently. In addition, openMosix doesn't currently offer support for allowing multiple cooperating threads to be separated from one another."

[Stang2be]

I havent tried it yet but I think the enterprise versions of linux support clustering but those arent free.

[AbecX]

[QUOTE=Sami]I guess this means a no-go for openMosix:

"OpenMosix, like an SMP system, cannot execute a single process on multiple physical CPUs at the same time. This means that openMosix won't be able to speed up a single process such as Mozilla, except to migrate it to a node where it can execute most efficiently. In addition, openMosix doesn't currently offer support for allowing multiple cooperating threads to be separated from one another."[/QUOTE]
When I was running SETI across the cluster I had to do it by running 40 or 50 SETI apps, one for each node.