computers on a network

[geefour]

at home i have 6 computers:

dual Cel400, 256mb
dual PIII, 896mb
dual PPro 64mb
K6-III+ 550, 512mb

would it be possible to network these computers with 100Mbit and make them run as one massive parallel computer or would 1Gbit ethernet be bette or is it not possible at all?

Marc

[smithdw]

You could run them as a beowulf cluster in Linux. It depends on what you are going to do with them. If you are just going to be running Seti or another DC project, I wouldn't recommend doing any clustering. I would just install the DC client on each computer and run them seperately. If you are going to run Seti, then install SETI Hide and use it to run the Seti Client.

[RampageIII]

There was a bit of discussion about this a while back.

Beowolf Clusters (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=117962)

[geefour]

would it be better if all the computers were the same spec like all Pentium-3's or Celeron's with same motherboard and RAM size?

[smithdw]

No, it doesn't make any difference to Beowulf. The only advantage with keeping everything the same is in load balancing, but Beowulf is able to do that with different components also.

[RampageIII]

smithdw 's original comment is probably the best.

As Seti@Home is a prime example of Beowulf clustering. They have broken down the radio signals into 340k chunks and send them out to the millions of users over the net.

We who have home networks analyze the chunks and send them back. Our networks are acting as Beowulf clusters by enhancing our individual stats(wu output) by the increased numbers we are able to process.

[geefour]

any chance of doing 3D Studio rendering or Photoshop or would it only work for programs optimized for Beowulf ??

[smithdw]

Your software would have to be written to take advantage of multiple CPU's that are spread across a network. To my knowledge those apps are not, only for multiple CPU's inside one box. Some of the 'really big' image rendering programs are specifically written for server farms. I can't remember the specific names, but you might look at info on Pixar, DreamWorks, etc. They might have a list of software and hardware configurations that they use. I don't know if any of the software is open source, but most likely it will cost a lot of $$$$$.

[Logan[TeamX]]

Here's what you need to do. Link them all via a 100Mbit switch. Use Dameware or PC Anywhere to manage them, depending on the OS used. Dameware is nice, cause you're not limited to the number of sessions open, where with PCAnywhere, you're limited to one.

Run the cmdline agent, with SETI Driver, or SETI Hide. I use SETI Driver, personally. Set them all up to run under your user account (email address), and watch the WUs go!

I'm doing this with 4 machines at home, and using PCAnywhere to admin them. I've heard of SETI Queue and others, but I don't mind a little bit of legwork. I remote admin servers all day long anyways :D

[smithdw]

Instead of DameWare or PCAnywhere you could use VNC. We use it here for remote admin on about 75 systems and it works really good and it's free. There's also versions for Windows, Linux, Solaris, Palm, WinCE, etc.

[Logan[TeamX]]

VNC eh? I'm going to look that one up :D

[AllGamer]

VNC - the real one, free
http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/download.html

:t