DISCUSSION: Live CD Clustering Using ParallelKnoppix
 

This thread is to discuss the article titled: Live CD Clustering Using ParallelKnoppix

looks like a good article. i setup ClusterKnoppix yesterday on our home network, and it was a breeze!

1.boot one computer from CD and start the clustering server (in the icon menu, bottom left).
2.reboot all the computers in your network, changing boot sequence in bios to network (they will boot over the network).
3.party time!

it REALLY is that easy! parallelknoppix is probably just as simple. here's a big plug for anyone who's curious... download and burn the iso and experiment. you'll be glad you did :D.

ps you can click "configure and restart" for the cluster server and click the radio box to add support for non-standard network cards if needed (i had a couple in my house, and one computer that can't network boot...i used it as the master node).

anyway... clusters are easier than they seem, and great fun. here's to coding in parallel :D

edited: "clustering server" should read "terminal server" in the sequence above.

Thanks for the review. Two notes:
- you only need 1 CD to use PKPX. The master node is booted using the CD, then the slave nodes are booted over the network using the terminalserver script.
- as of the 2005-12-02 release, security is improving. The next release (soon) will add additional improvements.

Any suggestions on software the average user can experiment with on PXPX? It would be nice if some cpu intensive programs like dvdrip were supported. The implementation of clustering for dvdrip is heavily serial, and changing the code is way beyond my scope of abilities.

The CD has a number of examples, mostly toys like a hello.c program, or more serious things useful to statisticians. There is a parallel mp3 encoder. Maybe I'll get around to adding a parallel povray and mandelbrot set plotter. I agree that some impressive examples that make sense to the average user would be a nice thing to add. As always, contributed examples are welcome.

woot,

wish i had the abilities to contribute dvd:rip. gonna be needing it a lot shorts. the mp3 encoder sounds cool though. i'll experiment with that, does it support ogg?

cheers

The mp3 encoder is quite out of date, and doesn't encode to ogg. Using it would be a quick way to get a low quality collection of mp3 files. It's just an example.