Hey, I've been thinkin about clustering some of my old computers lately, but what it do me any good? Could a cluster improve performance of an apache web server? does openMosix work for improving performance for the x window system? any general or in depth info would help!

openMosix makes the cluster act as a multi-cpu computer. I've actually considered running an old 6 machine cluster as a workstation, but from what I understand, it wouldn't make much sense. In order for a program to take advantage of all the CPUs, it would need to be written multi-threaded(I think using MPI, or PVM). As far as I know, most X programs aren't multithreaded, but I'm not sure about Apache. If not you might be able to get apache to spawn a process everytime it gets a request, and then openMosix would automagically transfer that job to the CPU w/ the least stuff happening on it, so it might help Apache performance.

Take a look at www.beowulf.org, that's where I got all of my information from.

I'd probably be running a cluster right now, but my parents won't let me, takes up too much electricity :-/