Distributed but collective software

[h41cyon]

Just a random question.


Does there exist any software out there for any platform that would allow me to use multiple computers networked together to complete a single computational task.

for example, say I have a movie I wish to encode in xvid. I want to know if there is an application out there that I can load up and it will act like a kernel, if u will, where I could then load up a xvid encoding program. This special kernel would take chunks of the computation required for this encode and dish each chunk out to a computer that's connected and then essemble the peices on the fly back onto one computer again.

Does anything like this exist? And not just Xvid encoding, could be other things too..

 

[MustangWorld]

Clustering?

 

[KodiakStar]

are you thinking Beowulf Clusters?

http://www.beowulf.org/

 

[BakedON]

OpenMosix

http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/

 

[h41cyon]

yes clustering seems to be the ticket,

Can anyone sugg any for windows that are pretty easy to get into?

 

[unhappy_mage]

Can anyone sugg any for windows that are pretty easy to get into?

No and no. Most of these programs are not easy or user-friendly. It's not a simple problem, and nobody has managed to simplify it to this level yet.

 

[Bill Clo]

I know nothing about clustering, etc, but how about this: use some sort of splitter program to divide the movie into several parts, and send one each to a machine. Let them encode that part,and then splice all the completed segments back together again?

Check doom9.org for programs you can use...