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Distributed Computing to gain more processing power

S

Salmonz

n00b
Joined
Aug 8, 2002
Messages
37
Hi,

I recently came into a tight situation at work with processing power. I crunch numbers for our credit card transaction reporting site as well as analyze massive server logs to find discrempencies in datetime's and cross-referencing 3 huge data tables.

The idea I had recently was either to upgrade my 2.6GHz PC at work to something higher such as dual system w/SCSI, or, to have a computer program to get the CPU power from our server farm to help me analyze data alot faster. The servers in our server farm are hardly using 25% of their CPU speed 95% of the time.

Any ideas on how I can cluster processing power within my own network environment to put to use at a single computer?
 
Probably not what your looking for but you could cluster them all together and make a linux cluster out of them, but then the PC's are basically 1 computer that shares resourses.

:confused:
 
also look into something called grid computing
 
THere's nothing available for practical small network use... Maybe I should write a program to do just that. Having all your computers in your small business utilized but at the fraction of the cost that IBM or Sun is willing to sell for.
 
And besides, I want CPU resources from desktop computers, not to cluster our AS/400 mainframe servers *who can afford those???*
 
what i was getting at was if you cluster the smaller workstations, it will show up as 1 machine basically but use all the resources from each machine in the cluster. Only problem is you can't use each machine individually as far as i know. They're basically locked in the cluster. But by all means i'm no expert so....:)
 
It all depends on the app you're running and type of cluster you're riunning.

In linux there are beowulf clusters which function like one machine, but you need much better than 100Mbit connections between them for it to be useful. Also any app you run needs to be multi-threaded and/or specially coded for beowulf.

There is also a mosix cluster which is more practical. Each node functions like a regular computer, but is aware of the other nodes- hence you could throw lots jobs at a small mosix cluster and the processes would migrate from node to node and distribute out so that the load was balanced. If you have a lot of repetitive jobs to run, a mosix cluster is pretty useful. You never have to assign a job to a specific node- it will go to the node with the most free resources automatically. You also do not need specially-coded appliactions.

Mosix clustering can be setup very quickly and easily by using live CD's with one machine installed as an application server. A modified distribution such as ClusterKnoppix is a perfect example of this.
 
That technology is already available if I am reading exactly what you want. Check out www.ud.com they have a DC type system which allows corporate PC's to share the load of all the apps that need to be done in the business.
 
Link doesn't work for me.

And do you mean distributing the load the same way distributed computing projects work,. by breaking a job into small parts and sending each part to a different machine to be worked on? I forgot about distcc for linux which allows for distributing a job for GCC (compiler) to multple machines on a LAN. That's not really a cluster though, but it sure is nice on an all gentoo network!!
 
take the , off the end of the URL

and thats what i was talking about, their stuff is called GRID computing or w/e

also if you want to get some G5's i believe apple is giving away the app they created for use in that giant university cluster
 
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