Possbile uses of Beowulf ... ?

[Worsham, Michael A.]

>Date: Fri, 4 May 2001 16:47:53 +0530 (IST)
>From: Rakhesh Sasidharan <rakhesh at cse.iitd.ernet.in>
>To: beowulf <beowulf at beowulf.org>
>Subject: Possbile uses of Beowulf ... ?

>Hi all,

>I was going through the beowulf.org site trying to find general
>information on beowulf's (and I did find lots), but there's something that
>I still am not clear about:
>
>  Suppose I have 6-7 old machines lying around with me, is there any way I
>  could use something like beowulf techniques to make them into a "super"
>  computer ?  I'm just a non-academic user, and the only use I think I can
>  put this to could be to play games faster, or surfing, or plays mp3s
>  etc ...  Individually, the old machines (486s and above) wouldn't be
>  efficient, so is it possible to combine them together and make things
>  work ?
>
>I went through a couple of articles etc, and that gave me the impression
>contrary to what I am asking; but still I ask to make sure. :-)  Or maybe
>it is possible to take the source code of normal apps, and beowulf-ify
>them ?
>
>Regards,
>__
>Rakhesh


I am doing something like this already. I am currrently running Scyld
Beowulf (www.scyld.com) on a small cluster I made at home for load balancing
through an online game system and web server I am developing. I recommend
taking a look at the Scyld site and ordering a copy of the Scyld Beowulf
personal edition and installing it. The slave/node PC's need at least 64 mb
of ram, a decent IDE or SCSI drive, and a PCI (not ISA) ethernet card for
minimal installation and configuration to take place. Other than that, its a
breeze to work with. 

The Scyld documentation is found online at the Scyld site, and the cost of
the personal CD is about $3.00 USD which is rather cheap through Linux
Central.

Scyld Site: http://www.scyld.com
Linux Central (Ordering): http://www.qksrv.net/click-734457-487846 then
search for 'Scyld'.

-- Michael