3 Idle Computers on Network, Any way to share the processors?

[coold8]

Hi,

I currently have 3 computers hooked up to my GIGE network. Here are the specs:

1. AMD Athlon X2 3800+ OC'ed to 2.79ghz S939
2gb RAM DDR PC3200 Dual-Channel

2. Intel Core DUO T2600 @ 2.13ghz
2gb of DDR2 Dual-Channel (forgot speed, OCZ ram)

3. Intel Pentium 4 2.66ghz w/ HT Disabled S775
1gb of Dual-Channel DDR1

Recently, on Computer #1 I have been doing a lot of video encoding and newsgroup downloading (since that is where all my storage is). I often times find myself maxing out my CPU at 100%, while my other two computers sit there at only 1-0% CPU usage. Is there anyway I can share the CPU of the other 2 computers since they are practically doing nothing? I have a very fast network that should be able to support the tasks (it is all Gigabit with Cat6).

Thanks.

 

[mikeblas]

Sure: have one of the other machines do your NNTP downloads while you continue to do your video editing on the first machine.

The more general answer is that, at this time, tasks can't arbitrarily be assigned to different machines in a small cluster on commercially available operating systems. There's no interactive-task load balancing, scale-out solution. Doing this for single, well-defined tasks is quite hard enough!

 

[duby229]

I'll give you some advice.... How usable it is to you depends on whether or not your willing to try something new.

OpenMosix baby yeah! hehe

Well, maybe. It's still not quite ready for the 2,6 kernel yet. But it does work. It's something called an SSI cluster service. SSI stands for Single System Image. What it does is it allows multiple computers to share process and memory loads between them, and literally act as a single computer. OpenMosix does not work well in all situations, but in a few it makes a world of difference...

Heres the deal. It does not propagate threads, instead it propgates processes. You wont see much of a difference if any on multithreaded code. Or from applications that only run one or two processes. You need applications that spawn a bunch of dual threaded processes. The number of threads dont matter so much, the number of processes do matter a whole lot.

So if you use applications that spawn a lot of processes, then it will work good for you. On the other hand if you use applications dont dont spawn many processes, then it wont work good for you.

Notice how many times I used the word "processes" It's important. The performance of the system, and how well it scales depends entirely on the number of processes your application spawns. The more the better. The less the worse.