Affordable supercomputer??
I couldn't resist to post this:
I came accros OpenMosix, this is a ultra geeky tool as you are going to discover:
Always dreamt of your own computer cluster?
Why should cluster technology be kept only for those who write their own scientific code and can pay for the expensive supercomputers or mainframe servers?
Quote:
Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some technology that would allow standard Linux applications to take advantage of a cluster without any need for them to be rewritten or even recompiled? Thankfully, there is -- and this technology is called openMosix.
(source: http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/esdd/ar...xw06openMosix1)
This is very cool to play with (easy install on redhat7.2 see howto at the end of this post), so if you have some old or newer boxes laying around, turn them in linux boxes and install an OpenMosix cluster.
You can use fast ethernet or even 10Mbps ethernet, offcourse gigabit ethernet would be excellent and expensive :(
Anyway with OpenMosix you can create a SMP, symmetrical Multi Processor, like you would have when you had more than one processor on your mobo, only now you can do this by connecting many small affordable linux boxes together, or if you are serious about your cluster, use high performance Xeon processors.
Using a cluster will not run your Opera browser faster, but it will manage and distribut several single tasks over different resources.
However this cluster is not going to fasten your java or Apache (since those use shared memory) it is going to work on all cpu intensive tasks, like image and sound rendering. MPEG / FLAC / ... OpenMosix will balance load over different nodes performing tasks very fast, like seti works while your cpu is idle, the cluster solution uses all idle cpu's from the nodes in the cluster (you configure it to act different too).
for the ones who got interested: http://howto.ipng.be/openMosix-HOWTO/book1.htm
Now I'm searching for some boxes to cluster ;)
info: http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
http://www.openmosix.org
http://howto.ipng.be/openMosix-HOWTO/book1
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/esdd/ar...xw06openMosix1
note: technicaly spoken such a OpenMosix cluster is not a real supercomputer like a Cray or something similar, but just a bunch of nodes working together in a cluster computing your large cpu intensive tasks fast.
