Computer Cluster Question

[joshh]

Hi all (first post!)

Recently i've been looking into computer clusters just out of curiosity.

I know that many clusters are designed for parallel computing with special software etc. but is there any way of making it appear as one powerful computer?

i know many people might say 'buy a powerful computer' etc but basically, if this is possible it will give me a post-GCSE summer project

I'm not sure how this would work, possibly by creating a single virtual machine with the power of the physical computers combined?

this may not be possible at all, like i said i'm just curious.


Many thanks,

Josh

 

[TrainTrackHack]

It's not. You can create a render farm for professional 3D editing, or some programmers find those handy when compiling massive sources, but you can't combine the power of several computers for everyday apps and games...

 

[tlarkin]

It's not. You can create a render farm for professional 3D editing, or some programmers find those handy when compiling massive sources, but you can't combine the power of several computers for everyday apps and games...

Ummm not quite true.

Clustering is done for several reasons. One is load balancing. Lets say you have 30,000 users at a university. Each of them with their own university email account. Just imagine how many emails get generated each day? Therefore, you get several servers, bind them to each other, and create a cluster for your email servers, so they all load balance and share tasks. Also, if one goes down, the others will take its place, so you are never technically down. Since time is money, you never want to have down time, because that is wasting time you could be making money, or in a university's case - learning.

You can also push out applications to a desktop via zen works, casper, SMS for windows, etc. Those applications and live and run off a server, and when a user logs in, they get pushed down whatever apps they would need. The movement towards web based apps will make a lot of people in the future run applications off a web browser on their company's server.

This obviously gets real super expensive, and you would have to be in an environment that could pay for that which is giant corporations and universities pretty much.

A cheap, free open source alternative you can look into is called the Beowulf project. It allows you to cluster vanilla Linux boxes into distributed computing networks. I haven't set one up but I have read about it, so you would have to learn that part on your own. For more information check this link out:

http://www.beowulf.org/