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.

Imagine a

[Anonymous Coward]

gorilla wearing a tutu.

What did you think I was going to say?

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.

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.

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)