HPC with linux and windows

ashu_crazyboy1994 · 10-03-2010, 04:10 PM

hi! i just heard many things from people about clustering old computers to make one powerful machine i got two extra machines having p4 and are 32bit and an AMD (phenom ii x4 64bit) can i cluster them and can i share the processing power from both windows and Linux? cause i trans code a lot of vids and also generate rainbow tables and for both i use windows so is there anyway that on master machine i use windows while the nodes use Linux to serve me

MS3FGX · 10-03-2010, 06:48 PM

Well, two P4 machines clustered together probably won't be any more powerful than your Phenom II due to the large overheads required in clustering. A cluster needs many nodes to really be effective, and the tasks it runs need to be well optimized for parallel processing.

As for using a Linux cluster from Windows, that would depend on the specific software you want to run, which you haven't mentioned.

ashu_crazyboy1994 · 10-04-2010, 11:36 AM

All i was thinking was using windows tools to generate rainbow tables with rainbow crack http://project-rainbowcrack.com/index.htm#download as it supports multi cores as well as CUDA so i thought adding two p4 PCs will increase the speed of rainbow table generation process but as it is windows only application i dont know if WINE supports HPC so i thought of a cluster consisting windows as the master server and linux machines as nodes.

what you all guys recommend?

TobiSGD · 10-04-2010, 12:00 PM

The link you gave us shows me that there is also a Linux-package for this software, so why the need for a Windows-master?

ashu_crazyboy1994 · 10-05-2010, 08:39 AM

ya it says that they have 32 bit and 64 bit Linux packages but they are nothing but archives containing .exe files meant to be used with WINE.