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Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the imagine-an-ah-you-know-the-rest dept.

renai42 writes "An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix that aims to utilise the unused nightly processing power of corporate desktops. Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk. CHAOS is designed to provide dumb node power to a cluster run by existing full-featured clustering distributions such as Quantian and ClusterKnoppix."

3 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? by Soko · · Score: 5, Informative

    No.

    Most entreprise level desktops have Wake On LAN and PXE boot capability. You send a magic packet to each desktop to wakr it up, and then tell the PXE BIOS to boot ClusterKNoppix via TFTP.

    It's not that hard to do, even for lazy sysadmins.

    Soko

    --
    "Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
  2. for information by cotyx · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hello For information this kind of stuff already exists, from long time. I invite you to visit this webpage : http://www.lri.fr/~fedak/XtremWeb/introduction.php 3 Regards

  3. Re:Useful? by TamMan2000 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pratt & Whitney, one of the big 3 jet engine makers, has been doing that for over a decade. It is there primary means of supercomputing.

    They have been at it so long that they had to write their own message passing system (PROWESS) because MPI was not there yet.

    I used to work for them as a computational fluid dynamicist, we were the main consumers of this "cluster".

    --
    "I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...