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Linux Desktop Clustering - Pick Your Pricerange
crashlight writes: "A Linux cluster on the desktop--Rocket Calc just announced their 8-processor "personal" cluster in a mid-tower-sized box. Starting at $4500, you get 8 Celeron 800MHz processors, each with 256MB RAM and a 100Mbps ethernet connection. The box also has an integrated 100Mbps switch. Plus it's sexy." Perhaps less sexy, but for a lot less money, you can also run a cluster of Linux (virtual) machines on your desktop on middle-of-the-road hardware. See this followup on Grant Gross's recent piece on Virtual Machines over at Newsforge.
but sounds interesting none the least.
I heard that the new thing will be putting a hundred procs on a board instead of designing a better arcitecture for the processor itself. This is the new intel modow. Everyone hop on board.
Why would you want 8 virtual machines when you can have 8 physical machines? Isn't the whole point faster processing in a cluster?
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
The purpose of running clusters is to increase processing power and/or fail-safety. How is running 8 virtual machines in any way a "less sexy" version of an 8 CPU cluster?
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Can I get a Beowulf clu......um, nevermind.
I'm sorry but it's just a big red box.
I can see why mac systems are stylish and perhaps 'sexy' but this is just big and red.
Although red is better than beige i guess.
So, it's about equal to my dual Athlon 2000+?
Yeah, it's a nice compact little box... But they're pulling in a phat few g's on each box. I'll build my own, thank you very much.
I know I'll get modded down for this, but here's an example:
Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 22, @02:45PM
JackBlack tells us about the "unbelievable deal you can get at KMart on all their overstocked computers and periphials! You won't believe the kind of prices on these things! I don't know about you people, but I'd rather swallow Draino than buy boxen from Big K! But, shit, whatever, I guess.
Timothy is his own conflict of interest.
What is happening to Slashdot these days?
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
It let's you point at your P100 laptop and say - that's my cluster, I do some SETI on it :)
I'm sorry, but for that price this is way under engineered. The origonal bewulf cluster was made with components on par, for the day, as the celeron modle of the redstone, for far less. If your going to spend the time and money building and marketing systems like this, they could have done a better job. They suck mobos in a big case and eth linked them togeather. Call me crazy but I think for that much money you could get a small backplane, 8 industrial PC's (powerpc/copermine/whatever on a pci card each w/its own memory) toss em in and spend the rest of your "engineering" budget, making a patch to the kernel for reliable communication over the bus, instead of slow eth connections.
besides with the speed advantages shared memory brings to multiprocessing a quad xenon would probably outpreform this.. deffinately a quad proc ultrasparc but those are pricey even used...
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
So... how many processors can you fit into a standard 44U enclosure now? If they've got an integral Ethernet switch do you get a gigabit uplink out? This would actually be really cool for Universities/Government Agencies to build insanely great clusters with small floor space. Still if you want insanely great maybe you should cluster a few briQ's together.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
I could. The form factor is the thing. I could use a few extra CPUs in a MOSIX cluster for my desktop, but I have no room for a small rack and associated power. This fits. I could make them into little application clusters -- 256 MB of flash is plenty per device. I could wish they had GigE, of course (since they obviously need to connect to NAS for data) or multiple NICs per system but even 100 Mb is sufficient for the intended markets.
I saw a quick demo of a multi-noded briQ (by Terrasoft Solutions) at SC2001 a few months ago and was very impressed. The ability to leverage the power of the PPC in vast numbers (and in a very small form factor) was incredible. I wonder how these would do in a head to head competition?
They offer a 4-8 node tower running 500 MHz G3 or G4 CPUs and drawing "roughly 240 watts per 8 nodes (less than a dual-processor Pentium-based system)." Quite impressive.
I'd like to have see chips that incorporate the CPU, RAM and something equivalent to the North+South bridge. Motherboards should be designed to take 1-32 of these plugged into some godawfulfast bus. CPU and RAM should be one in the same and scale together. RAM co-located w/ the CPU would be much, much faster. Most systems and applications can scale with more threads or CPU's. CPU's by themselves are just about as fast as they need to be for any task that cannot be divided into multiple threads (I'm not talking about poorly written progams). This whole getup would be significantly more elegant, reduce parts and complexity and probably be cheaper to produce in the long-run.
I don't see this as the same as a system-on-a-chip. With those, you're integrating video and audio. I'd either rather NOT see that integrated at all or have a portion of this new CPU combo thingy incorporate a DSP or FPGA region(s).
Whoa, time to put down the crack pipe.
The primary disadvantage of clustering is the network bottleneck. You lose out because even 100mbps is only a small fraction of what the pci bus of even low end pentium systems are able to handle. At LEAST go with gigabit ethernet so you can push over 100 megs per second between processors. This will greatly increase the usefulness of an integrated cluster by decreasing the one primary disadvantage.
Also a bit pricey, but there would be some cost advantage in reduced footprint for some environments.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
i believe this was already posted a few weeks ago.
How is 8 800MHx Celerons sexy?
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
...or maybe it's something else (bandwidth?), but it looks like they're slashdotted.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
you can also run a cluster of Linux (virtual) machines on your desktop
So you're suggesting that I divide my machine into 8 virtual machines and then cluster them for uber fun? Figuring the extra latency, wouldn't it be faster to just leave it alone?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Uh, no.
2*20008*800
40006400
Of course, the dual athlon kicks butt for many applications (I know, I use one!), but it all comes down to the needs. What would be cool is if low cost dual athlon boards (ala tyan tiger) were substituted (8*2*2000 = 32000, or 5 times faster)... but then the whole thing would just melt with the heat. I do like the embedded flash/diskless aspect of the system, though. Its a simple cluster in a nice box.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Clustering under vserver scheme is pretty dumb, if it was in fact meant to be serious.
....
vservers assume that a machine has resources avaiable and that no one instance is consuming 100% of the systems resources. Application built for utilization under a cluster would most likey CONSUME 100% quickly and easily, otherwise why run them under a cluster in the first place ????
I do like their monitor applet, its pretty coll for basic cluster managment/monitoring.
At the same time all you people complaining about price...lets see
800mhz cele w256 meg each MB, NIC and whatever storage, lets say on the cheap $300 each
4 350 Watt PS $100
Ok a really cool case and PS
Time to load software, lets say weve done it before and it take 8 hours
Physical Assembly and testing 5 hours
My bill rate and personal time is worth 120/hr
$1560
Hardware $2400
Power Supply $ 100
Mildy cool case$ 100
THAT COMES TO 4160, Hell, add to that I dont have to build the SOB AND it comes under warranty , you betch you A** Id buy one of these
PLEASE think before you gripe about prices...
Looks like a deal to me
PS, Kernel version is 2.4.12 from what I saw on their link to products showing a screen shot Ayeee.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
I guess that one hit post. Almost though. Thanks for the kind words, and thoughtful haiku. I'd better start whoring again, or I won't see mod points for a while.
I may not have the $4.5K to buy the box but that software looks spiff. The java demo of the cluster monitoring was realy cool. How about I get a stack of these and use the free software.
Yeah yeah network speed blah blah. Let a man dream!
OK, the price for these kinds of things is really nice and low. Low enough to make anyone in the numerically-intensive computing arena really want something like this.
(However, I probably wouldn't want one of these as my desktop machine if the power supplies took more current than a typical wall outlet, if it made as much noise as a helicopter taking off, and if heated up my cubicle to 92 F.)
But the key ingredient in my mind is making these distributed boxes more conveniently usable, much like those 64-way big boxes from Sun and SGI.
How far along are MOSIX, Scyld's products, others(?) that make these distributed clusters have a nice Single System Image?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
$4500? WTF For? How much could a motherboard/processor combo w/ memory possibly cost for 800mhz celerons? You could build one of these w/ a custom case for $1000
Hmm. 8x800MHz, not quite rack-mount, about 10U high, $4,500. Why not just buy eight rack-mount PCs and an Ethernet switch? You can do so for approximately the same cost and have fully independent PCs, nothing particularly proprietary, plus you can have as many as you want instead of groups of eight.
I agree. I don't see how Linux will ever be ready for the desktop. First of all it's expensive. The actually costs of upgrading hardware is not reasonable. Secondly, who is going to spend time programming software that they can't sell? It's great for people who need to learn about what is out there, but there just aren't any options available. Third, this whole article reaks of hypocrisy. They say Linux is free and runs better than our products, yet you have to upgrade to use the desktop. With our OS, you don't need more than one processor to use the desktop. It's just not practical to use Linex.
Take care...
#!/usr/bin/perl
how_about_a_beowolf_of_these();
sub how_about_a_beowolf_of_these {
fork();
how_about_a_beowolf_of_these();
}
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
I've been building my cluster from various remaindered/cast-off/refurbished machines I find. Computer Geeks is a good source.
Load balancing is frelling difficult, but I've been doing some solid parallel programming work that translates nicely to "real" clusters. I'd love to buy one of the Rocket Calc boxes -- but I can make a darned nice box for a lot less money with more processing power, if I'm willing to have cables and such all over the place.
The only real cluster-related problem I have is my lovely wife. She's one of those people who want things to "match" (so why in frell did she marry me?), and my "heterogenous" cluster just isn't very aesthetic. She just doesn't understand that the cluster's job is to compute, not to look pretty!
Then again, the Rocket Calc machines are attractive, and the color would go with the living room furniture...
All about me
Redundant, maybe, but off-topic> ?!?!?!?
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
If this it the 3rd report, then where is the first and where is the second?
here is the google cache since the site seems to be slashdotted....
: www.rocketcalc.com/+rocketcalc&hl=en
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:q2egeLKmoVQC
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
forget this thing, buy something from RLX Technologies and get similar CPU power while saving a -bundle- on power and cooling costs!
What I want to know, is how does the software manage to leverage the use of the cluster. They mention that programs wont need to be changed to take advantage of the clustering. How can this be? It doesn't mention much about this Houston software that seems to handle it. Usually applications have to be especially written for clustering. The website also doesn't seem to mention what tasks this system is really good for.
quite interesting how no version of windows can do what linux does, example is today's topic.. 8 way clustering.. xp? nope, 2000 nope.. another example of how Microsoft is becoming a bloated toy not useful to anyone anymore.. what happened to the innovation? what happened to actually trying? Ms quit back in 1995 trying to innovate or put out quality. and Linux will overtake it this year.
yup, ms loses in 2002. it will be a grand sight indeed!
You're right. Just a wannabe. Sorry, I'll have to make sure my stupid posts are at least Spelled correctly! :)
My Bad!
My sig hates me. That's ok, I never cared for it much anyway.
Although I'm joking, let's just take a look at some numbers, hypothetically speaking.
*borrowed from Tom's Hardware*
Linux Compiling Test
3.35 minutes for a Athlon XP 2000+
14.2 minutes for a Intel Celeron 800mhz
(now, here's where we stretch it)
Figure 1.7 minutes for a dual Athlon XP 2000+, 50% of the other time.
1.7 x 8 = 13.6 minutes
But, who really compiles with a cluster, really?
It'd still be faster....At least on a few benchmarks, and at least in theory
(2) Why is it taking so long for someone to make the obligatory "Imagine..." post?
To run multiple linux instances on one "middle of the road" server, you need VMWare GSX. It ain't free. In fact, it's $3,550.00. (there goes your "a lot less money" idea, T.)
As for the value of this product, I see it clearly. Not all computational problems need high data throughput between nodes. And their Redstone-A product gives you an 8 node PIII 1Ghz cluster with 4GB of ram for $6000. And all the networking set up and ready to go. Give it to your Scientist and they don't need to know jack about network or configuration, they just treat it like another unix workstation.
When I think of the ~ $20k each we spend on Sun and SGI workstations for our scientists, I cringe. This I wouldn't (won't?) think twice about buying.
You know when spielberg said that the next big smash wont be from him or some big studio but it will be from a woman named buffy from idaho. This brings that possibility one step closer. I can see this as a renderman render farm or even just an effects renderfarm for some of the effects the AVID generates.
gimmie 2 of these, an AVID, and a $200,000.00 camera and lens you've got the next ET on your hands... (Nooo not cheech and chongs Extra Testicle get your mind out of the gutter)
it's getting there where the general schmuck has the power that hollywood does.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cost of upgrading what? Did you even read the article? This is a CLUSTER, not your run-of-the-mill desktop or workstation. I could get linux to easily run on an old 486 motherboard that is somewhere in the bottom of my closet.
If any OS is expensive due to upgrades, it is definately Micro$oft OS's. Can you see Windows XP running on a 486 33 mhz? I thought not.
Additionally linux cost a LOT less to administer by IT shops than Microsoft operating systems. With Microsoft operating systems, you have to *click* here, *click* in this text field,etc. I could have ipchains up and running fast than you could have NAT running on Windows2000.
However, this cluster is a great solution to a lot of problems. It would definately free up colocation rack space, and make it easier to do virtual hosting.
r00tdenied
Platinum Networks Hosting www.platinum-networks.com
To me, this almost looks like a combination of various old SGI systems.
So THAT makes it COOL.
My new workstation (yes, it's finally coming, for those whohave been wondering; the purchase order goes to main campus today):
$4800: 2xAthlon 1900, 2gb ddr.
My memory and bus are significantly faster. I believemy total processing power is equal or close under most applications.
Then I get a few things that aren't in that bundle:
2x18gb cheetah 15000rpm u160
4x 9gb cheetah 15000rpm u160
21" sony monitor & video card
scsi cdrw
would I really get any more from this unit???
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Take care...
If you're looking to do the same thing, cheaply and with a little DIY hardware tech time, simply buy a big ATX case with room for a couple of extra power supplies, install a 386 or 286 mobo (all ISA slots!!!), and buy a number of these computers and plug them in. They don't draw power from the motherboard, so you don't even bother connecting the 286 to power. Instead, tie each power supply to one or two of these cards directly (requires a little soldering), and there you go. A cluster in a box.
If I had the money, I'd be doing this myself. Instead, I've got a rack full of 4U AT cases with dual PPro 200mhz machines instead. The one advantage to having full sized motherboards (with PCI slots) is that I'm installing triple-channel-bonded ethernet so I get gigabit ethernet bandwith, without paying gigabit prices.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
That'd give you 2 processors per chunk. By stapling four chunks together, using MOSIX, you'd get the same as an 8-proc SMP box, without the hyper-expensive motherboard.
Now, this is where it gets fun. (Yes, I've been reading up a bit on this.
I don't know what the "default" multiplier is, but I'd guess it's probably x16, or thereabouts, given the speed of the rest of the system. In which case, if you threw in a 1GHz clock (I suggest oven-baked, as they taste better), you'd get 16 GHz on the processor.
Now, THAT kind of ramp-up is not going to be easy. Chips run hot as it its, and if you plan on overclocking an Athlon by a factor of 8, you can expect to fry eggs on the surface. As for the poor RAM chips.... those are REALLY going to suffer!
My guess is that if you strapped pelziers onto all the chips, immersed the entire system into some synthetic, non-conducting fluid that you can super-cool to, say, -135'C (there's some stuff 3M makes that'll handle it), and you devised some way to keep it that cold, the chips might survive the experience.
Might. I'm not even going to say "probably". To the best of my knowledge, no overclocking or supercooling experiment on conventional PCs has gone to that extreme. The only ones that came close (a NZ project involving pouring liquid nitrogen into the case) trashed the disk drives and BIOS.
On the other hand, I've been checking up on the tolerences of components, and what you COULD build, if money wasn't an issue. The technology for an 4x2 MOSIX/SMP cluster, overclocked to 16 GHz and still running -does- seem to exist. (The keyword is "seem" - most chip specs are calculated, not actually measured, according to the data sheets.)
Now, I suspect that it'd cost a damn sight more than $4000, just for the parts, even if you could mass-produce such a monster (assuming you had the engineering skill to build it in the first place), or even find anyone crazy enough to buy one, given that it'd probably be more cost-effective (and certainly safer) to go with an IBM mainframe at that point.
On the other hand, kernel compiles would be quick.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Really, I agree this way over-priced for the specs. I built myself dual-node quad Xeon cluster (8 processors) for almost half that price.
Besides, why in the hell is timothy spreading this??? The guy is promoting this "personal cluster" by spamming several newsgroups. Last week he hit a number of groups including comp.os.linux.hardware, comp.parallel, and comp.graphics.rendering.misc. That by itself ought to be more than enough to convice you not to buy for this guy!
WTF?? Moderated down? This is fucking clever.
So this has gotten me thinking. Would something like this be the final nail in the SGI coffin? Imagine this scenario:
Disney/Pixar/Other purchases a whole bunch of these clusters-in-a-box as their workstations for each graphic artist. The price is comparable to (or less than) that of an SGI workstation. When it comes time to do the final rendering of Toy Story XIII, you connect all of the individual workstations to create one BIG cluster. Thus, each artist has exceptional horsepower on their own, and the group is able to take advantage of it as well. As a result, no one purchases SGI workstations, and since the workstations can be clustered, nobody buys SGI servers.
Could this be the way Linux surpasses SGI/IRIX in the graphics market?
I'm sorry but none of your supported products runs on a 486. and as normal MS mindset goes, it should be illegal for people to use those older products because they are stealing revinue from the mother corperation by using the legacy apps. (example, the intentional locking of IE6 to install to Win95, you can actually hack the installer to install it and it runs fine on win95, but Ms dont want you to. and therefore forces the user to upgrade by intentionally breakingthings.)
Sorry, but Win3.11 was barely a product just like Visual basic 2.0,3.0 and 4.0.. most companies happily ran DOS during the WFWG days because the software was nothing more than a re-branded OS2.
please tell me WHAT current supported product runs on a 486 in a useable state? booting is not useable, it should act like Windows NT 4.0 on a P166.. that fast but not real fast (as if the entire NT line was ever fast. NT3.51 on a P-III 800 is still dog slow.)
Like I said there is no innovation in the windows products anymore, the re-hashing of the same old code with prettier pictures is it's impending doom... just like how noone is buying XP except when it's forced on them during a new computer purchase.
Linux will win big, like it won the embedded market.
That's right. When you upgrade your workstation to a run of the mill server, you will have a desktop server. Nobody's going to want to use that. Honestly, now. How many Luinux users do you expect to use this X Server?
I hardly think so. How could a machine with only 8MB run Netscape? See the requirements for yourself.
There's just no way. Don't get me wrong, though. I do appreciate your thoughts. It's just that when you blindly state your opinions as opposed to facts, then it becomes very difficult for casual readers to make a decision.
I wish our company and yours would work together to improve the accessability of computers for everyone. Linux is great for programming in C, Assembly and other scripting Languages, but for the casual user, businesses, and in depth programmers, we offer standardizations that allow for user friendliness.
In fact, I take back what I said about Linux and programming in C. You guys have to have autoconf in order for it to be portable. We don't. On top of that, we have *several* programming languages to choose from. See here.
Again, not true. Casual users will be forced to read HowTo manuals and man pages. If you follow the link into the several pages, you'll see that some of them are *years* old!
Take care...
Can someone mod down all this trolling?
As pointed out above the communication bottleneck is no problem at all for many of the most CPU-intenstive parallel computations. Monte Carlo-simulations for example can often be done with just about no communication at all. The same is true for many of the really hard computational tasks where we just don't have any algorthims that can make use of intensive communication among the processors.
8 X Shit = Shit.
I'd rather have 2 Athlons than 8 Celerons. That's the most retarded fuckin thing I've ever seen.
Netscape? why? Opera is smaller faster and more standards compliant than netscape and IE. typical MS fud preaching that netscape is the only choice, maybe back in 1992 it was. Yes, He is right. in fact I have a working Linux box with X windows and a nice WM running a nice graphical email client, Opera, a wordprocessor (abiword) spreadsheet (gnumeric) and graphical arts app (gimp) on a 486 DX25 with 16 meg of ram and only 32 meg of swap on a 1 gig hard drive with TONS of room to spare. as for the comment of the user would have to read to figure it out.. that is also true for any microsoft product. the casual user cannot figure out how to secure their nice new W2K or XP machine because they have been lied to by microsoft for years that it's not needed and microsoft products are safe to use. (blatent lie.. it is unsafe until you follow many many complex steps to secure it and patch it. and then connecting it to the internet directly is still unsafe.)
Sorry. Ms still cannot compete. and a casual user can pick up linux operation within 1 week, the same timeframe it takes a casual user to figure out the silly changes made from one version to another in the windows dance.
Seems to me this box is aimed at developers with a large cluster environment in the back room.
Think of it this way, you develop the apps on the 8 way desktop machine and when they are tested and ready, you deploy them on the big boys. The box is useless as a serious computing cluster, but not for developing!
Oh well.
The other day, I saw an auction on eBay for an SGI Octane. The price was over 100,000 bucks. Looking at the pictures, I could tell why: It included a rack with a bunch of really fancy stuff on it, and an SGI Octane. That is why I consider sexy.
Actually, here is what I really want. I want to have several of every brand of computer, running all the operating systems available for each brand. That way, I'll be able to access software and information for any of them. It'll cost a ton of money, and that's money I don't have, but hey, who said you can't imagine stuff?!
Oh well.
oh go fuck yourself, redundant my ass you silly twerps
What about using open software instead of proprietary software. For instance, you can run multiple instances of Linux using User Mode Linux http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net. This can save you the $3,500 for VMWare GSX.
Oh wait...
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
"Clustering under vserver scheme is pretty dumb, if it was in fact meant to be serious."
...) ?
...
The vserver scheme is the _inverse_ of a cluster, not meant at all for applications that you would otherwise run on a multi-node cluster.
Did you even go to the vserver homepage , and read the introduction of the introduction? ->
Linux computers are getting faster every day. So we should probably end up with less, more powerful servers. Instead we are seeing more and more servers. While there are many reasons for this trend (more services offered), the major issue is more related to security and administrative concerns.
Is it possible to split a Linux server into virtual ones with as much isolation as possible between each one, looking like real servers, yet sharing some common tasks (monitoring, backup, ups, hardware configuration,
We think so
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
So this has gotten me thinking. Would something like this be the final nail in the SGI coffin? Imagine this scenario:
Disney/Pixar/Other purchases a whole bunch of these clusters-in-a-box as their workstations for each graphic artist. The price is comparable to (or less than) that of an SGI workstation. When it comes time to do the final rendering of Toy Story XIII, you connect all of the individual workstations to create one BIG cluster. Thus, each artist has exceptional horsepower on their own, and the group is able to take advantage of it as well. As a result, no one purchases SGI workstations, and since the workstations can be clustered, nobody buys SGI servers.
Could this be the way Linux surpasses SGI/IRIX in the graphics market?
Clustering virtual machines is about as useful as making a RAID drive accross partitions of one drive.
(Being that it sucks and is very inneficient, but lets you test the software holding it together.)
Start Running Better Polls
"Frell" is a word used on the TV series Farscape; it has the nice ability to replace many different cuss words with on catch-all phrase. For example: "To frell with it!" or "Frell you." And using "frell" avoid those nasty negative moderations that can so bruise my tender ego.
As for "fuck", "hell", and other cursatives: I make sailors blush, youngster; I've been coding so long, I've had to invent or borrow new cuss words because I wore the old ones out. I'm bored with "fuck" the word "although not the act, mind you), and am looking for new, fresh alternatives.
All about me
Perhaps less sexy, but for a lot less money, you can also run a cluster of Linux (virtual) machines on your desktop on middle-of-the-road hardware.
Why would you do that? I suppose that you could develop under such an environment, and gain some convenience for clustered code developers that way, but you certainly would not want to deploy a clustered application on a virtual cluster, that would nullify the point of clustering, and in fact harm performance!
that get Slashdotted...
I would love to use one of these (especially the higher-end model) for a build server. I seem to remember a parallel make utility for Solaris (one that allows you to use multiple machines to do a build). Anyone know of something similar for Linux?
--JRZ
and with there 8 processor goodness there website is already down..
You don't seem to answer the main question the /. readers want to know about. Why would anybody want to install a desktop on a 486? Even KDE development isn't geared for that platform anymore. Ever tried to install Debian on a 486 with only 8MB?
Take care...
Maybe they could put apache on a couple of these and not have to deny web traffic when they get slashdotted.
Only a thought.
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Again, not true. Casual users will be forced to read HowTo manuals and man pages [linuxdoc.org]. If you follow the link into the several pages, you'll see that some of them are *years* old!
Ipchains is not *years* old as you put it, so the howto's definately can't be. Many of the howto's are old, but that is becuase a lot of things are backwards compatible with the newer kernels.
r00tdeniedPlatinum Networks Hosting www.platinum-networks.com
For the typical way clusters like this are used,
Windows actually works fine. Run PVM, MPI and the
like..code in Fortran using the excellent compilers
available and away you go. Oh wait..you've never
actually done something like that..you're just talking out your ass like most people around here.
Check the very large windows clusters down at UIUC
by Andrew Chien etc.
In practice you will be mach fatser. The Celerons can never manage to communicate fast enough in order to compile faster. What you have is probably twice faster, three times cheaper and draws three times less energy. Some people are just lucky...
Uh, yes.
I believe a dual athlon 2000 will smash it.
Let' see 8 CPU on 10MB/s vs 2 CPU each are 3-4 times faster on 2100MB/s. What a joke. Doesn't even compare. The athlons will be faster by at least a factor of 2.
Try yelling "CUNT!!!" in the office instead! You may be jaded with "fuck", and not getting the stress relief you need from it, but I expect that screaming "CUNT!!!" at the top of your lungs will be more satisfying and simultaneously fill your co-workers with fear that you have gone off your rocker.
Pretty darn useful, if you ask me. I just started playing around with VMware last week, and I doubt I'll get a full night's sleep until I get some kind of Beowulf cluster up and running. I've made several attempts in the past with real hardware, but it took too long to dedicate and set up "N" different types of machines. With VMware, I can play with several configurations using several distros, and when I like what I've got, clone a few VMs and test some more. When I finally know what I'm doing and can justify the expense, I'll move on to setting up a real cluster. Until then, I'm just happy to be on the learning curve.
When I said it all comes down to needs, maybe I should have been a little clearer. I was giving the usual "appropriate hardware" depending on what kind of application you're trying to run spiel; i.e. it all depends on what kind of hardware needs you've got.
For example, if you're running a single-threaded program, A 2*2000MHz system will be 150% faster than an 8*800MHz system because only one processor can be used. However, if you are raytracing 8 frames of animation, the 8*800 system will be 60% faster than the dual, because bandwidth requirements are low, interprocessor communications are low, and the task is plain number crunching.
Where did you get 10MB/s and 2100MB/s? Are you assuming dual fibre channel for your dual athlon and making the byte/bit mistake?
If you want to talk bandwidth, then you should make comparisons to the switch version of the rocket calc (note: it's called calc for a reason, because bandwidth isn't this things strongest suit - go with an SGI or myrinet if that's what you need), and you'll get loads more bandwidth (8*100 Mbit/sec).
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
No way I'm buying anything with XP in its name, dude.
Ok.. so VMs makes sense because it allows seperate virtual linux O/Ss for each major server function. (web database ftp..). This is good for management and accounts. However, "they" are still making claims that it offers somekind of performance advantage over running them all on one O/S. I mean... call me crazy but I don't see how there is much of a performance advantage.. if not just wasted memory here. Someone please throw me a clue.
The link your .sig points to is educational in that it shows a post that has (I think) clearly been subjected to a recursive 0: Offtopic moderation.
Even the AC responses were given 0: Offtopic - which is highly suspicious given that Offtopic usually takes a 0 AC post to -1.
Now I just know this is going to go -1: offtopic but I encourage those people who do see my message to CLICK THE SIG!
Smeg head.
How may a jerky beef have some nuts ?
I can play solitaire and code so much faster with this baby. Come bring it on.
http://saveie6.com/
I would have been ecstatic if someone made personal clusters consisting of dual 1.5Ghz Athlon nodes on gigabit ethernet a long time ago yet only now has someone decided to market personal clusters of single Celerons. Time to give up on the technically possible and base wish lists only on the technically marketable.
"I could have ipchains up and running fast than you could have NAT running on Windows2000."
Lessee. Setting up Internet Connection Sharing in Windows 2000:
-- Connect both ethernet cards to their respective locations (one to your router/modem; the other to a hub)
-- Go to Network Properties
-- Right-click on your external ethernet adapter (which you should probably rename to "External")
-- Click the Sharing tab
-- Click the checkbox labeled "Enable Internet Connection Sharing."
Done. NAT routing for up to 255 computers in less than 5 minutes.
You picked a terrible example.