I am supposed to help my brother install linux. Unfortunately, he has several old computers that really can't handle much in terms of processing power. I was wondering if linux is at the point where it would be worth while to set up some sort of home use/desktop parallel processing cluster to increase his computing power.

What are the specs on these old machines? Setting up a cluster may not be necessary. -- J.W.

not sure what the specs are, he hasn't been very forthcoming. At least two intel processors at 166 MHz which make them pentium processors. He might get a pentium II, 266 MHz to throw in. I believe he's got 64 MB RAM in one and 32 in another. I am sure that he can get linux up and running on them.

What it comes down to is: is parallel processing worth the effort to set up for basic home usage, or are basic home applications even able to take advantage of a cluster? Nothing spectacular here, photos, net, knowing him, he'll probably pick up some basic programming sooner or later.

To be honest, I'd say No, this is not worth the effort. You could definitely install a minimal Linux distro on those machines, running a lightweight windows manager, but if you want to do anything that involves running a typical desktop environment, from a practical perspective my bet would be that you'd want/need a more modern rig with more RAM (and probably a lot more disk space too -- if those machines were original Pentiums, I'll guess that the disks are no larger than about 2G or 3G)

Assuming you've got the basics such as the monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD, etc, you can build your own box for only a couple hundred bucks. That's the route I'd take, and the overall performance almost certainly would smoke a mini cluster of 2 or 3 Pentium 166's. Plus you'd end up having a functional system a lot sooner than going the cluster route (although you would gain a lot of useful experience by setting up the cluster) Strictly my 2 cents. Good luck with it either way -- J.W.

Can it be done? Yes.

Will it help much for desktop use? Short answer, no.

Why? The amount of effort and time that would need to be put into getting a cluster up and going with old boxen for a better desktop would be out of the question. Put it this way, everything that is rendering on your screen needs to be local for the best results. . . so the most you can pass along to the other computers to do is stuff that would run in the background. . . which in this case are system related processes which also need to run locally.

So for general desktop use... email, web browsing, and text editing... Building a cluster out of old computers will not do any good.

BUT!!!

If you plan on using these boxen to compile software or crunch numbers. . . then yes, the extra computers will do a lot of good.