Beowulf acting as one computer?
 

does a beowulf cluster act as one computer. I need to know, I'm trying to get my parents to lett me take some old computers off the IT person at school, and I need a use for building a cluster other than as an educational project. I'm planning on using the beowulf as a firewall/server. Can it be done?

the thing about a cluster, a process thread can run on one processor.

so if you have 1000 computers in a cluster, it would still take the same length of time to do a task such as convert a .wav file to an mp3..

however you could converts 1000 mp3's at the same time.

clusters are good for very heavy multimedia stuff... physics.. and other things that are designed for clusters. for a firwall and home server, its pretty much useless.

Yea but if your using a trilateral injuction it might be difficult to run an inverse lattitude configuration.

I was under the impression that cluster would be useful for processor heavy uses. So the cluster would not have all the hard drives act as one? I kind of need a real application for this, but if there is no way to make the hard drives act as one, then I'll find another use for it.

is there any way to have the hardrives in the cluster to act as a RAID array? or do the HDs need to be in the same comp.?

If you are wanting to use a cluster to rip DVDs for encode MP3 you will need the right software (if it is out there). Google for them DVD rip cluster.

For your parents you could tell them that you are going to see how long you can make pi, or some other complicated math problem.

could I set up the HD from these computers to set up a RAID array across the six different machines? I don't need to rip DVDs, but computing pi would be kind of cool. These coputers are useless on their own, so a 2.4Ghz P4 would be able to copute pi faster than this cluster would, but even still.

I don't know about that one. That is an interesting question, but I really don't know enough about clustersto say yes or no. My guess would be no becuase, (again just what I think I am be wrong) each computer has to have its own OS. But it would be worth looking into. There is a live CD made for clustereing you might want to check them out.

You could look into using MOSIX.

MOSIX is a parallel computing interface with lots of features that would be suitable for what you wanted to do.

But I haven't used mosix yet (not enough machines etc) so I am not sure how its performance would fare on your setup.

Look onto http://www.mosix.org/ for more information

i've looked at openMosix, is that the same thing(basically)? I'll look into, I also think that I won't be able to set up a RAID array. Thanks for all your help

even if each computer needs its own HD, can I use the storage space on the HDs as one?

come on, nobody knows?

I don't know, but I think not. Thats is more like a Raid.

i seriously doubt you could virutal raid the hard drives, simply because of the drastic speed diference between the IDE interface and even gigabit ethernet connectons. the network would be just too slow to synchronize that much data... although i'm sure someone is going to correct me on this one...