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I have 3 old computers lying around right now running a P2 at 800 MHz(?), Intel Mobile 1.6 GHz, AMD Athlon XP 2000+ at 1.66 GHz, and (might not use this) P4 at 2.7 GHz, all with 512 MB Ram, and am considering clustering them together for fun/knowledge. They would be running an undecided version of linux, preferably ubuntu based.

The issue is what I want to use it for: general computing and occasional video encoding. By general computing I mean day to day tasks. However I'm not sure if every program started by a single X session is going to exist on the same machine, defeating the purpose of such a system. Will programs be split up or exist on one machine?

Second, assuming this is running 100baseT ethernet (not sure if the PCI slot itself could handle Gigabit), would the speed of having a program exist over the network be an issue? It seems that the constant asking of various things in RAM would be quite slow.

And before you say "buy another computer!", that's not the point of this question. I'm asking would it be usable, not necessarily practical. And yes I know, this is going to be extreamly power consuming.

TheLQ
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3 Answers3

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You can certainly do this. Any linux distribution should be able to do this out of the box.

X11 was designed to allow programs to be run over the network. X11 has the concept of a server, which is running on the computer that you are sitting in front of. You can start X11 clients on any computer, and they will display on the X11 server. X11 uses quite a bit of network bandwidth, but 100 MB should be fine.

With this setup, you will be running individual programs on different computers. Generally, when people talk about clusters they mean applications running across several machines. There are very few apps out there that are designed to run across multiple machines, outside of scientific number crunching.

KeithB
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Nobody mentioned a Beowulf cluster.

deltaray
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One day-to-day use would be to have them be distcc hosts. Which would be nice if you were running a source-based distro like Gentoo

SleighBoy
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