How to linkup 4 computers for performance?

[Xorp]

I don't know if it's called supercomputing, or clustering, or whatever, but my friend has 4 3.2Ghz P4's lying around his house that his dad gets from work. We were wondering how you can combine these units to act as a single unit, for combined performance, or if it was even possible. Just a fun little project we'd like to attempt.

 

[andy04]

theres something called folding, i have seen it in some forums, where the idle CPU time is utilized but other computers...
I have no clue what so ever about how its done. But I know one thing that this can only be utilized my programs which do HUUUUUGE calculations which go on for hours if not days...

 

[sonoma1993]

for this to work, most likely need somekind of server software. for hardware, i'm not sure what you would need.

 

[MerlinRML]

Making computers work together can go from fairly simple and straightforward to rediculously complicated and expensive.

I'd recommend starting with a simple active/passive cluster. Move to an active/active load-balanced cluster. Then go to an HPC cluster.

What you will find is that there's not a whole lot to the hardware side of things. Shared storage and communications interconnect are pretty much all there is to it. It's the software side of things that tends to get complicated very quickly.

 

[imported_Tick]

Text.

 

[AllGamer]

it's actually quite simple

but i know of this can only be done in LINUX

unless you are planning to give up your games, and other "windows" like activities, then there is no way to do it.

you can easily find all the required files for LINUX to do supercomputing

 

[zephyrprime]

Even with the right setup, your program must support clustering to take advantage of a cluster.

 

[Fallen Kell]

As others have already said, yeah, you can cluster them, but you need to know that your software will be able to run that way. Heck most games are not even multi-threaded much less written for use in a clustered environment. The only major software that is clustered will be database, web servers, terminal servers, and high availability services (for High Availability, go look at <A HREF="http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/products/overview.jsp?pcid=1019&pvid=20_1">Veritas Cluster</A> for an example, but this is multi-thousand dollar software hence why there is no price listed and you need to call) . After that, 99% of the software that runs on clusters will be custom build applications for simulations, image rendering, video rendering, data analysis, and software compiling (and custom built meaning that the people who own the cluster coded the application themselves).

So, unless you code software, or plan on running a web server or database, you won't use the capabilities of clustering. But if you just want to play around, well, install linux or Sun Solaris 10, and install the Sun N1 Grid Engine or compile and install a MPI environment like LAM/MPI and go write your own software which uses the MPI environment....

 

[jose]

Start reading:

http://www.beowulf.org/

http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/

Regards,
Jose

 

[Xorp]

Thanks for the info so far.

Anyone know a Linux distro that can be used for this purpose?

I know my way in and out of Fedora Core pretty well.

 

[Missing Ghost]

I would suggest openmosix. I suggest you use it in gentoo, which has it as a kernel choice. However, technically it can be done on any linux.