Linux cluster in commercial office?

Korsedal, Brian korsedal at zaiqtech.com
Tue Sep 18 14:39:27 PDT 2001


I work in a company that designs ASIC's (application specific integrated
circuits ... chips) and FPGA's.  We use two sun servers and a bunch of PC's.
The software we use for simulations runs on Unix and Linux.  We'd like to
look into clustering our PC's so that we can have an extra high performance
server.  Each PC would still have to function as a terminal (office apps and
the ability to run processes on the unix machines) but use the free CPU time
to run simulations.  Is there any implementation of clustering software for
this?  If there isn't, it would be an interesting thing to look into, there
are many offices with computers that are barely used.  My CPU sits idle 95%
of the time and it would be great to caputer the extra CPU cycles.  Does
anybody have any thoughts about this or know how to make it happen?  

My theory would work something like this:

	Partition each hard drive with RedHat 7.0.
	Upgrade to 1Gig ethernet.
	Install Bewolf software.
	Run StarOffice, Netscape Nav and other linux tools for Office
functions.


I probably need a very comprehensive plan if I am going to convince my
company that it is worth trying.  Any help would be greatly appriciated.

Sincerely,

Brian Korsedal





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