Building a Linux XBOX Cluster

Hack Jandy writes "Getting Linux to work on an XBOX became relatively easy a few years ago, and building an XBOX render farm became the next logical solution. Anandtech bought 8 XBOXes and clustered them into a neat project any hardware hacker could appreciate. Check out the results as Anand pits his 8-way cluster against some Xeon and Opteron workstations as well."

Comments

Beowulf Cluster

[DreadCthulhu]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of . . . errr, wait a second.

Re:Beowulf Cluster

[SilentChris]

I can't imagine it. Halo 2 has been in my Xbox for the past few days and I'm sure as hell not taking it out.

Imagine a

[Anonymous Coward]

gorilla wearing a tutu.

What did you think I was going to say?

Printer-friendly version

[TCM]

Here.

This kind of geekiness turns me on

[Dancin_Santa]

Finally a real hardware story! How many YRO stories did we have to slog through to get to this kind of meaty story?

Clustering XBoxes? What kind of maniac would even consider that kind of thing? My kind of maniac, I guess!

Click here to enlarge

I didn't even have to click it. I'm already there, man!

Re:This kind of geekiness turns me on

[G-funk]

Click here to enlarge

I didn't even have to click it. I'm already there, man!

Score: -1, Too much information

8 People less playing Halo 2.

[3770]

Somewhere out there in the world there are 8 little boys who are crying because they can't play Halo 2.

Duct tape...

[drclaw007]

it has a dark side, a light side, and it holds the universe together Oh and XBOX Beowulf clusters :)

Imagination comes in on page 8

[rjamestaylor]

• Page 8

• A Beowulf Cluster
  So far, we have played around a little bit with the idea of a stand-alone XBOX doing some neat things. But what if we want to actually make a high availability processing cluster across all of our Linux machines at once? This is the murkier world of XBOX PCs, distributed computing. There are a lot of really good documents detailing how to set up a secure, robust and stable Beowulf Cluster, but this isn't one of them. We only want to benchmark 8 XBOXes in parallel operation.

Amazing restraint by the good folks at Amandtech not to pander to the Slashdot crowd with an easy, "Imagine a...."

Ugh...

[wrinkledshirt]

Now we have a Beowulf Cluster of bad XBox Beowulf Cluster posts.

A few years

[worst_name_ever]

Getting Linux to work on an XBOX became relatively easy a few years ago

You mean, a few years ago when they started selling XBoxes...?

playstation 2 cluster

[frankmu]

http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/cluster.php

i think this was on slashdot a few years ago.

Hardly

[kinema]

a neat project any hardware hacker could appreciate

Hardly! Running Linux or some other OS on an XBox might have been a neat trick a few years ago but now it's old hat. Hell, my grandmother could do it if I pointed her to a good website. Likwise with the Beowolf cluster. Such clusters aren't exactly difficult to construct anymore especially with the advent of projects like OSCAR.

Just like to point out...

[rubee]

I'd just like to point out that the point of a cluster is not to link together a bunch of cheap machines to save money; the time and energy required to write paralleled programs far exceed the cost of hardware. Rather, the point is to gather the highest end commodity machines you can afford and attain mainframe-level performance.

Re:Just like to point out...

[rubee]

First off, I seriously doubt many highschools are teaching parallel computing as part of their computer science curriculum. Second, a decent cluster of 8 nodes or so can be had for less than 10k, well within academic research budgets. Third, I never said anything was wrong with it; I'm just saying its not something thats practical.

Where's the cheese?

[Ratso Baggins]

Compare Wal-Mart PC to the Xbox for this application

Price:
PC < Xbox + modChip

CPU:
Xbox < PC

RAM:
Xbox < PC

Cool:
PC < Xbox - (that's arguable considering you are adding to the Xbox sales figures.)

WTF? This one I just dont get (beyond why not)

Re:Mod chips?

[stratjakt]

An XBox mod chip is essentially just replacing the BIOS with another one.

So the hardware itself is just commodity parts. Even if some crazy US law says you cant sell it for the "intent" of piracy, you can get the parts legally at the local electronics shop. Kind of like smart card readers are perfectly legal - unless you use them to pirate satellite, then DirecTV drops "da hammer".

Microsoft hasnt really raised a stink about it and has pretty much left the modding scene alone.

Of course, the BIOS image you use may or may not be illegal. It'll either be a XBox bios hacked to play warezed games (illegal, copyright MS code), but theres the Cromwell bios, a GPLed replacement to boot linux up (legal). Chips either ship blank or with Cromwell.

Why pay for a modchip?

[mprinkey]

There are very stable software-only hacks to get a hacked BIOS installed. The best one is called UDE. I uses a buffer overflow in the font handling calls of the Xbox dashboard (actually a replacement dashboard). Then it installs its own BIOS and runs its own software.

Here is the skinny. I use this to launch XBMC and turn the xbox (w/ remote) into a very nice media center for every tv in my house. Plus, it plays games.

factor in the GPU

[mo]

Note that these tests only uses the computing power of the main processor, while the GPU is sitting idly by doing nothing. With a little effort, and perhaps the use of some tools that harness the computing power of the gpu, these clusters would get a lot faster. It may not help in tasks like the distributed kernel compile, but things like parallel raytracing which can use the massively parallel floating point capabilities of the xbox graphics card could really benefit here.

In the future, the playstation 3 will really provide an opportunity for some enterprising cluster builders for couple of reasons. First, the initial release of most console hardware is where the manufacturer sells them for the biggest loss. Sony actually makes money on PS2s now even if you don't buy any games, but when they release the PS3, they'll be selling at a loss and your performance-to-cost ratio is going to be huge. Secondly, if the architecture decisions behind the PS3 make it anything like the PS2, it will be much easier to harness the vector engines for general purpose calculations (compared to other graphics cards). Most of the horsepower in the PS2 (and potentially in the PS3) is in it's parallel vector engines. While the general purpose processor is reasonably fast (300 mhz mips), the vector units can dispatch a ton of parallel floating point operations which enable it to run games that would crush a 300 mhz pentium with a comparable circa-2000 graphics card.

Re:factor in the GPU

[rsmith-mac]

Except that the Xbox GPU can't do floating point. It's a DX8(Pixel Shader 1.x) class GPU, so it's limited to short pixel shaders in the 32bit(RGBA) integer space. Future consoles will no doubt be able to make use of the GPU like you anticipate, but the GPUs in current consoles predate the modern technology needed.