Hello, I have 4 PCs, all of which are Pentium/AMD 300-500Mhzs. I'd like to cluster them together to build a single system which can use all of their resources (which would then act as an X server for a couple of dumb clients). All have 10/100 ethernet ports, and USB. How would you proceed?

Thanks

Well, the easiest to use clustering software (other than Beowulf, perhaps) is OpenMosix.

And the easiest way to run OpenMosix is ClusterKnoppix, which is the live-CD distro Knoppix running the OpenMosix kernel.

Keep in mind that OpenMosix will not create a true parallel processing system. To do that, you would need something like Beowulf, but more importantly, you would need to have software applications that were written specifically to take advantage of cluster processing.

OpenMosix has the advantage of being able to run completely standard programs over the cluster. However, OpenMosix does not put program threads on each node of the cluster. What it does instead is move programs around to nodes that have the most free resources.

Example:

Lets say you can convert a CDA file to an MP3 file in 1 minute on a single machine.

If you had four identical machines running in an OpenMosix cluster, you couldn't convert the file any faster. However, you could convert 4 files in the same amount of time that you could convert 1 file before. The reason is that OpenMosix will send the conversion processes to individual machines.

On the other hand, doing the same experiment on a Beowulf cluster would let you convert the file in 15 seconds. The only problem is that you would need to run a converting program that could handle multiple processors.

So, OpenMosix will let you multitask like never before, but won't really make any of those tasks go any faster.

Cool, thanks for the leads.