Question about this sub forum...

[Matrox462]

Is this sub forum dedicated purely to distributed computing for scientific research? Is posting about home-brew parallel/distributed computing aloud in here? I've always fancied the idea of running a LAN of my older computers and putting them to use. Is this the place to post questions about that?

 

[CRXican]

huh?

 

[Matrox462]

huh?

...maybe I didn't make myself clear enough...

is this forum purely about folding with F@H (or similiar) or can anything relating to distributed computing technology be posted. I am new to distributed computing, and would love to setup a small cluster with about 5 computers, and wanted to ask about the software options I have (PVM, ect) and stuff like that...

I guess I pretty much want to get into it because I have the necessary equipment (an already setup network, and the computers) and want to learn about it.

Unfortunately though, I don't know anything about programming, and am unsure if this would be too over my head to try and learn,,,

 

[pduan87]

This forum is basically 99.9% FAH.

 

[Oldbenwa]

There is a great bunch of people in here that would love to help you with anything related to distributed computing, however, I don't know if many of us will be able to help you as most of us are just here for folding.

Oldbenwa

P.S. Doesn't hurt to ask though.

P.P.S. That was one hell of a run-on sentence.

P.P.P.S. MMMMM Mojo....I mean beer.

P.P.P.P.S. I'll shut up now.

 

[unhappy_mage]

is this forum purely about folding with F@H (or similiar) or can anything relating to distributed computing technology be posted. I am new to distributed computing, and would love to setup a small cluster with about 5 computers, and wanted to ask about the software options I have (PVM, ect) and stuff like that...

It's mostly about F@H, but other people are welcome to post about other distributed-type things.

What were you looking at setting up?

PS: Oldbenwa, you're STILL up and posting?

 

[mwarps]

P.P.P.S. MMMMM Mojo....I mean beer.

P.P.P.P.S. I'll shut up now.

I had a few last night and actually experienced my first drunken loss of decorum.

I have been drinking for about ten years, but I don't drink heavily.

I blame the beer and the bartender and the fact i wanted to toss the bartender on the bar and give her a mixed drink. women that hot should not bartend.

 

[Matrox462]

Thanks guys for being so helpful lol, yea, I noticed that 99.9% is about folding. Reading about people folding really makes me want to set up some boxes to fold. I might end up doing that. Anyways, I just woke up, so I'm too tired to talk about distributed computing (I was like Oldbenwa and up way too late ) So I'll probably just start a new thread with some questions I had. Thanks again guys.

PS. I don't have my glasses on, so excuse any mistakes

 

[[Spectre]]

Well please do......you get these cool H's




There is a cpu giveaway going right now......and soon case badges...maybe shirts!

And you get ot beat up on OCAU

 

[BillR]

I had a few last night and actually experienced my first drunken loss of decorum.

I have been drinking for about ten years, but I don't drink heavily.

I blame the beer and the bartender and the fact i wanted to toss the bartender on the bar and give her a mixed drink. women that hot should not bartend.

No Matter how hot you can never blame the bartender for your uncontroled urges... it's in the rule book

 

[Hito Bahadur]

Get a feeling that BillR's tended some bar in his time.

 

[Matrox462]

Well if I do fold, these are the computers that I could use

2.26GHz P4 512MB
1.3GHz AMD Mobile 512MB
533MHz AMD K6-2 128MB
433MHz P2 128MB(?)
233MHz P1(?) 256MB

Yes, the AMD mobile is a laptop, but it's just sitting on a cooling pad for the majority of the time... so I could set it up if I wanted

I highly doubt I would set up the 233MHz, way too slow to be worth it, and plus its passively cooled, so it gets hot as hell.

So what do you think? I might use the 533 and 433 to start off

 

[Herulach]

If youre worried about putting it on your main rig realy dont. Use the console version installed as a service and you wont even notice it. I changed to that because i had a few issues with EA games and teh graphical client, but no problems whatsoever with the console version. Use the -forceasm switch to make sure it takes advantage of the 3dNow stuff on the k6-2, and probably dont turn big packets on on either of the slower ones.
Theres no reason not to put the laptop on too, if youre worried about heat you can set FAH up to only use a certain percentage of cpu, and also top not run when youre on battery power.

As far as clustering goes what do you want to do? If its compiling you want to look into a program called distcc, it works in conjunction with distcc to compile things, and the gentoo live cd has it, so you can just boot off that on the machines you want to add to the cluster. As far as general purpose clustering goes you want to look for beowulf clustering, do a google, i get the impression that its one of those things that is either very simple or very difficult to set up depending on how lucky you are. But i dont really think its worth it as far as anything that isnt specifically built for running ona distributed computer goes. Its far too I/O bound for that.

 

[Matrox462]

If youre worried about putting it on your main rig realy dont. Use the console version installed as a service and you wont even notice it. I changed to that because i had a few issues with EA games and teh graphical client, but no problems whatsoever with the console version. Use the -forceasm switch to make sure it takes advantage of the 3dNow stuff on the k6-2, and probably dont turn big packets on on either of the slower ones.
Theres no reason not to put the laptop on too, if youre worried about heat you can set FAH up to only use a certain percentage of cpu, and also top not run when youre on battery power.

As far as clustering goes what do you want to do? If its compiling you want to look into a program called distcc, it works in conjunction with distcc to compile things, and the gentoo live cd has it, so you can just boot off that on the machines you want to add to the cluster. As far as general purpose clustering goes you want to look for beowulf clustering, do a google, i get the impression that its one of those things that is either very simple or very difficult to set up depending on how lucky you are. But i dont really think its worth it as far as anything that isnt specifically built for running ona distributed computer goes. Its far too I/O bound for that.

Thanks for the reply I'm not worried at all about running it on my main rig, as long as it doesn't noticeably slow things down. I also get worried about constantly having the processor running hot, but I monitor my temps, and everything is always fine. I might just do what you said and install it and set to only use like 70-80% CPU. And that's perfect that the laptop can automatically not fold when on battery! (I was wondering if it could do that)

Well, here's the thing... I have these computers that aren't really being used. I would love to use them as file servers, but currently the largest drive is 20gb (not counting my main computer and laptop obviously ) So since I can't use them as file servers, I figured it'd be awesome if I could harness the extra CPU power. But that might not be simple , I currently know very little Linux, and don't you need specialized programs to distribute the processes? I'm not a programmer by any means, so I might not even be able to harness any of the additional CPU power. I'm downloading ClusterKnoppix right now, as I really like the Knoppix distribution, and figured I'd give it a go.

Realistically, I know it's not possible to hook up a few PC's, then suddenly everything runs faster. What I'm wishing I could do, is some how on my main rig, do something such as... say rip Cd's to mp3, but instead of maxing out *this* computers CPU, the process get done on say, my 1.3GHz laptop... Is this even possible, or am I clueless on how this all works... lol, please forgive my ignorance on all this. I try to search for stuff on this type of topic, but usually it ends up being way over my head as it's geared more toward programmers.

Also, if it makes any difference, I'm running XP Pro on my main computer. Is there any windows software that can distribute processes among other windows computers? I imagine that most of this type of stuff is linux/unix.

Thanks again for the help.

 

[Herulach]

Im not aware of any windows software that does it, certainly not free stuff. Although i have just had a bright spark idea. If you were to get hold of one of the cd virtualisation driver things, that let you set up a cd drive as a network share. Then assuming you have xp on the laptop too, you can use the remote desktop featuer built in to windows to open it up and start your mp3 ripper going, rip them to a shared folder and youre away. Not the most elegant solution ever, but it would work. Or obviously if you set one up as a file server, it really is the ideal way to learn linux. Id suggest debian, as a good mix of newbie friendly and still have to do enough to understand whats going on. You shouldnt need too much stuff, just a basic install and samba (shares files in a way windows can read) to set up a pretty basic file server. Samba is very easy to configure. You would of course have the option then of doing a similar thing as i mentioned above, but with something like ssh (essentially gives you a remote command prompt) But given the option between being having my main rig at 100% cpu for 5 mins, and waiting about an hour or more for an mp3 to encode on an old k6-2 533 i know what id choose. Diskks are cheap, i dont know how hardware savvy you are, but installing a new hard disk is about the easiest upgrade you could do. Although youd have to do a bit of research into what size your motherboards support, and maybe add in a pci card if its somethoing like 20GB. Anyway, either post here or pm me if you need any more help, as this is straying ever so slightly off topic.