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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."
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
Imagine a hackneyed cliché of these!
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
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
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.
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.
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?"-
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.
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
Yet another blogger begging for an audience.