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Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters
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."
I remember hearing about how in the future, we would be able to plug in to the internet and not only access information but also spare processing power. It would be really handy; most of the time you are only using a fraction of the power of your computer (for example, my usage is hovering at around 8%, and I have a movie playing as well as several other applications running), but when you need more processing power, you could get it on demand. Of course, the lag would make it too slow for video games and such, but for some computationally-intensive stuff (video editing, ray-tracing, etc.) it would be perfect.
Real_men_don't_need_spacebars.
Nice. A hacking company wants me to load a tiny 6 megabyte linux client into my secure network that then becomes a dumb node in my cluster, "without disturbing (or even touching) the contents of the local hard disk". A company that says they use the power to crack passwords.
Yeah, sign me up with the full knowledge of how many company network policies I would be violating, and the fact that I would not trust them as far as I could throw a datagram.
Hmmm, it quacks like a duck. I would swear they taught us this in both "Social Engineering" and Advertising. Give the "mark" a little benifit, and then take over his world.