Hi
I've basically got a few Pentium 3 computers laying around in my room, and i was thinking of linking them up and clustering them together to build a computer cluster. Now I've done some reading that suggests there are many different types. Load Balancing Linux clusters seems to be the kind I want but what software would you recomend?

I don't really have any parallel software to run, I'm not trying to run Folding@Home, or anything like that. My goal is to build a Computer Cluster that would share the load amongst it all, so that as I run more programs it wouldn't start to slow down. I do understand that just joining a few computers does not really mean that the cluster would be faster either.

Any suggestions on how I could achieve this goal?

Thanks
Chris

Have you given any thought to a live cd like Cluster-Knoppix? It would give you a chance to play around with out all the hassel of trying to setup multiple system to work together. All you would need is several copies of the cd.

http://clusterknoppix.sw.be/

It is a little dated but I have tried it and it did work when I was playing around with it. I didn't spend much time with it though before I went on to other things.

Its a viable solution, however it is rather out dated, the last changes to the distribution was back in 2004. Think it might have to do with the fact openMOSIX was not compatible with Kernel 2.6? (Am i right?)

You might look at this one too.

http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/

Parallel Knoppix uses MPI(Message Passing Interface), this is not the same as load balancing, I was under the impression that programs had to be programed to use the MPI interface inorder to work. From my type of usage, Firefox, archiving data, encoding videos.... day to day use does not use MPI, so using parallel knoppix would be useless to me.