Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

iMac Beowulf Cluster Comes to Life

Posted by timothy on from the taste-the-rainbow dept.

AmigaAvenger writes "Finally a good use for all those old IMacs that many organizations have laying around collecting dust. We have set up a 5 node (4+1 controller) iMac beowulf cluster, which is appropriately named Skittles, and is running PPC Yellowdog Linux, with MPICH 1.2.6 cluster message passing software."

8 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. iMac Beowulf Cluster? Yum! by XxtraLarGe · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They should have lined them up in a circle like in the old iMac posters!

    --
    Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
  2. Useless... by afd8856 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can understand the geek factor, even the teaching / experimenting factor. But, if anybody is in the same situation, please donate those macs to a charity. There are milions of kids in this world that have no access to IT, and could benefit from this kind of equipment. Even if its net value is below 100$, you can bet some kid could play or learn on it.

    --
    I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
    1. Re:Useless... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Remember that this was at a university, with old university computers. If they were bought with certain government grant money, they might not be able to give them away for a certain number of years, or even give them away at all...

  3. I still have ask... by anactofgod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ..."Why?"

    Not why do it. But why post about it.

    This may be interesting if the cluster was created to serve some purpose. but if the purpose was merely for the admins to learn about how to set up a Beowulf cluster, well, that exercise is probably performed at least once a day somewhere in the world.

    Hardly seems to warrant a post on one's own Web site, let alone a link to Slashdot, IMHO.

    "Skittles"...Cute name, though. Wait til Mars, Inc. hears about it...

    --

    ---anactofgod---

    "Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
    1. Re:I still have ask... by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Insightful

      it's answered in TFA.

      *******They said it couldn't be done. Well, actually the said, "Why would you want to?" The answer is, of course, "Because they're there, and it's the geek thing to do."*******

      good enough reason for me. besides, serves as good practice.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:I still have ask... by anactofgod · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I understand that, because I actually did RTFA. My point is so what? Fine, do it as an exercise in something new-to-you. Do it as for practice. But understand that there is absolutely nothing news worthy, or even noteworthy, about what was done.

      Now, if they were going to post information about tasks that they were seeking to accomplish with said cluster, that would interesting. More interesting would have been metrics associated in the performance of said tasks.

      But, basically this post is about some guys who installed software on some computers, configured in a manner similar to what has been done thousands of times in the past by others, and got it to run.

      *YAWN*

      I'm sure it was fun. I'm sure it was interesting, maybe even educational, to the guys doing the work. But hardly worth sharing with others, IMHO. I even call into question how high a "geek" factor this activity has. At the end of the day, they installed software for the sake of installing software.

      If you don't agree, then perhaps I should post articles on how a buddy downloaded and installed Cloudscape on a Sawtooth G4. It was exciting (to him)! It was cool (to him)! Sure, many others have done the same thing, and sure, he's not actually using it for anything, But hey! It was geeky, especially since he did it on a Fr night instead of doing something socially interactive.

      --

      ---anactofgod---

      "Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
    3. Re:I still have ask... by forkazoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why is this poor bastard being modded troll? He is right. This isn't the slightest bit newsworthy. It's a five node cluster, FFS! I have done 3D rendering using five different architectures simultaneously, and it certainly wasn't noteworthy. A friend used a whole computer lab of Sun boxes as an impromptu cluster. I used a lab of PC's as a renderfarm in school.

      If this was a cluster for some really cool task, like rendering for a CAVE used in brain implant research in a 3rd world country, or something, it just might almost be newsworthy. This isn't. Not even a little.

  4. again? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Hasn't it been pretty much shown that you can cluster pretty much anything given a network connecting the elements together? What seems to be lost is that the point of clustering is to achieve a certain amount of performance for a lower cost using multiple cheap elements than the alternative higher prices single high performance system. The whole point is lost when the amount of time and effort that goes into the project costs more than the equivalent single out-of-the-box system. In this case, you're seeing on the order of tens of megaflops with what is likely to be a rather high node-node latency. It costs in the high hundreds to low thousands of dollars now to get on the order of 100 MFLOPS to a few GFLOPS in a single box without the latency penalty incurred by message passing programs on the cluster.

    So, in addition to beating a dead horse yet again, this project is actually a waste of money if cycles are what you're looking for. And last time I checked, that's pretty much all clusters are for.