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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."

16 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. Useful? by Daxx_61 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know whether it's just me and my uninformed nature, but it occurs to me that switching off these computers would be saving a hell of a lot of money. Rather than using them for something else - which I notice TFA is not clear on, something about a demonstration - why not just power down?

    From the Pure Hacking website - Internal on-site penetration testing gives the business the assurance it needs to conduct safely on the internet and with business partners.
    It would make a lot more sense if this was only intended for use in demonstrations and testing though, as I can imagine very few companies would feel a need to use this sort of distro on a nightly basis, but for one off activities it may be useful.

    Imagine a beo... oh, wait.

    --
    Quoth the server, "404."
    1. Re:Useful? by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Insightful

      there are already corporations out there that turn part of their desktops into a cluster by night.

      they have a need for computation power that they can't satisfy and this gives them that at no extra investment besides electricity.

      if you power them down then they're doing nothing, your investment just sitting on there. by using them to calculate stuff for the engineering department they're doing something usefull and the return on investment on them gets better.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Useful? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      I work at Taco Bell too, and I let the computer running at night so our anti-virus can prevent robbers from stealing it.

    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...
  2. Think Lusers. by Soko · · Score: 5, Funny

    CHAOS is designed to provide dumb node power to a cluster

    Hell, my nodes are occupied by the dumb during the day, too. Have we found an actual productive use for lusers?

    Soko

    --
    "Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
  3. Wow... by CleverNickedName · · Score: 5, Funny

    Imagine a hackneyed cliché of these!

    --


    Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
  4. 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
  5. Precursor to the Grid? by kyle90 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  6. This is bound to help the cause... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Corporate Linux Fundamentalist 1: There's this new product that uses all our PC's overnight to harness their power for the greater good. It runs on Linux. It would be a good way for us to become more Linux friendly in the workplace.
    IT Director: Um, sure, OK, what's it called?
    Corporate Linux Fundamentalist: Um, Chaos?

    Could they not of thought of a better name, how about .Grid or something else Microsoftie, well at least it wasn't called KAy05

  7. Re:Seriously?? by sstrick · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, but I can see companies that need to crunch large datasets installing this to do their own processing at night.

    --

    "Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
  8. Re:Seriously?? by Ersatz+Chickenweed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seems to me that what TFA is suggesting is that organizations can use this to gain part-time Beowulf capabilities on machines that could be running Windoze or whatever during normal office hours -- they wouldn't just be giving the processing time away to some random project over the Internet (although that could easily be done too), but using it for in-house projects where an outside connection probably wouldn't even be needed in most cases.

  9. CHAOS: Groovy Name by AhaIndia · · Score: 4, Funny

    "We were just looking for a groovy name that would stick out in a world of groovy names,"


    Actually their first choice was "Mandriva" but somebody had recently taken that "groovy" name... Aahhh, just missed!



    --
    ~Aha~
  10. 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

  11. Quality by Indy+Media+Watch · · Score: 5, Funny
    From the press-release

    What is CHAOS - the supercomupter for your wallet?

    The most significant change to the project, as far as the open source community will be conerned, is the quality of the distribution

    As they are concerned about quality, any chance they could put all that unused computing power towards a Goddamned spell-checker?

    --

    Indy Media Watch-Proctologist of the Internet

  12. Re:Do I lose the use of my CD drive? by boron+boy · · Score: 5, Funny
    It's not that hard to do, even for lazy sysadmins
    I think you underestimate my degree of laziness.
    --
    Yet another blogger begging for an audience.
  13. Hello? McFly? by Spackler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.