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.

Comments

Virtual macines???

[TheAwfulTruth]

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?

Re:Virtual vs physical

[f00zbll]

I don't know much about building a cluster, but I thought one of the limiting factors of clusters is network latency. If they have it all on the same motherboard, or designed their own bridge to connect multiple CPU/MB, it would be faster right?

By the fact that they are all incased in the same box, rather than connected via a switch, it has less distance to travel. I don't know that 5 feet of CAT5 could make that big of a difference. On the otherhand, they could have designed a different way of bridging the systems and dramatically reduce latency. In either case, it is intriguing.

Here's what I'd much rather see

[S. Allen]

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.

Re:under engineered.

[benedict]

Sure, you could build it yourself, and your
hardware cost would be lower.

But what about the cost of your time, in terms of
dealing with vendors, putting machines together,
testing them, integrating them, and testing again?

I'm guessing these machines come with support, too,
though I can't tell because their web site is
Slashdotted.

Re:only 100mbps?

[mpe]

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

Depends on the application in question. There are many parallel processing tasks which do not need massive communication between processors. Effectivly each processor simply gets on with it's task on it's own.

Re:Linux not ready for the desktop [was Re:Expensi

[r00tdenied]

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.

r00tdenied