[Beowulf] Similar to a multi CPU machine?

[Robert G. Brown]

On Wed, 9 Nov 2005, Jake Thebault-Spieker wrote:

> Is there a way to make a cluster act like a dual(or triple, quad, etc.) CPU
> machine? I'vee been looking at purchasing a dual PII machine, but then
> realized that I have six 166Mhz machines sitting around doing nothing. Does
> OpenMosix do this? Is there OpenMosix for 2.6.x? This will be run on debian,
> if it works.

Boy did YOU come to the right list.

That is what this list is devoted to, as it has been for coming up on a
decade now (hey Don, when IS the ten year list anniversary?:-)

OpenMosix is one solution.  Scyld is another.  bproc (close kin to scyld) is
a third.  SGE (or other batch/queue managers) yet another.  Even plain
old linux and some job management scripts are more than adequate for a
lot of tasks.  Finally, if you are looking for "true parallel" operation
(many CPUs working on a single task vs many CPUs working on many tasks)
there are a whole lot of alternatives involving the distro of your
choice with e.g. PVM or MPI or raw socket programming layered on top.

Be careful -- some of these cost money, some of these require a custom
kernel.

    rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu