Seperate or combined?

[bluestrobe]

Right now I have about 5 computers running the graphical client of F@H and XP Pro:

(2) 333mhz P2 with 128MB ram (1 crunching machine, another as a simple ftp/file server)
(1) 2.66ghz P4 512MB ram (G/f's computer)
(1) XP +3000 with 1gb ram (my main computer)
(1) Athlon 1.1ghz 512MB ram (Family computer, rarely used, mainly for net searching)


I have the 5.03 graphical client running on all of these systems currently. In the next month or so I plan on adding (1) 933mhzX2 P3 system and a 733mhz Celeron system to the mix and maybe taking away one of the 333mhz P2 systems.

Would it be practical to run some of these in a cluster to combine the work or is it better running cores on each machine alone. They are all networked with CAT5 behind a WRT54GS.

 

[Malak]

How much output you getting with the P2's? Those are pretty old, you could probably retire both of 'em.

I haven't heard of anyone doing a cluster, not sure how it would work.

 

[bluestrobe]

P2's are keeping their ground with the crunching. They are better than nothing.

 

[ProviaFan]

Unless you want to experiment with other forms of load balancing, setting up a cluster would be Too Much Work (tm). If you are interested, check out the OpenMosix project; you'd still need to have one computer (the "master") with enough individual F@H clients to account for each CPU in the cluster, as F@H is not multithreaded by nature and thus unable to take advantage of more than one processor with only one client. If I'm not being very clear, let me know and I'll try to explain more... 🙂

 

[bluestrobe]

Made plenty of sense. So in reality its best to do what I'm doing right now and cluster node setups are only good for applications with multithread capabilities?