openmosix knoppix

[A. Jorge Garcia]

BTW, this is all GPL, right? Maybe Klaus will include it in the standard KNOPPIX release?

Klaus, you listening?

TIA,

[reub2000]

I know thing about clustering except, that it's a group of comps that do the work of a supercomputer.

Now, how would I set this up with Cluster Knoppix? Is it setup, when I boot each PC from the CD automaticaly?

[god]

here is my deal... i have a bunch of older, crappy-ish computers i got for free... they dont have harddrives or monitors/keyboards... (no biggie, knoppix replaces hard drive, and i have a spare monitor and keyboard i swap around to test) but they do have CD roms, that they can boot from.... what I would LOVE to do, is remaster clusterknoppix(or set up an etherboot) to boot up, and start sshd (for system maintance...) and fire up openmosix and distcc, and connect to my main computer as nodes, effectivly giving my main computer a bit more CPU cycles.. I am hoping to automate this, so if the computers ever go down (power out) when they come back online, they boot and reconnect as nodes automatically.... Also, i am behind a private router that runs a dhcp... is there any way to leave that intact (not turn it off) and get this dream of mine to work?


In the long lun, I hope to be able to slap a remastered CD into my parents computer and get all the comps running as a large distcc/openmosix cluster for speedy remaster fun, and install-gentoo-stage1-on-a-brand-new-lappy fun....


any advice is welcome...

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, I was confusing OpenMosix with Beowolf. Beowolf clusters are clusters of PCs running Linux to do massive number crunching with specialized parallel processor comiplers and such.

Well, early on in the Beowolf project they started out with the "embarssingly parallel supercomputer" model. It went like this. If you had to run the same ellaborate calculation on several different numbers, you simply ran the calculation program on several different computers each for a different number and then pooled all the results when each program run terminated.

Can this be done on an OpenMosix cluster? As I understand it, I could link all my PCs on my LAN in such a cluster but start and monitor several processes from one PC, right?

For instance, say I want to calculate a billion digits of pi as accurately as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. I could evaluate the area under the curve y=4/(1+x^2) from 0 to 1 (=4arctan(1)-4arctan(0)=pi). Instead of evaluating this on one PC, I could assign 1/25th of this area to one PC, another 1/25th to another and so on. Could I start my area program from the same PC for all processes and eventaully the processes that can't be accomodated by the resources of my PC will migrate to other PCs in the cluster as needed? Can I then get the results of all 25 processes on my one PC when they are done to add them all together and get pi? I would use a reimann sum program for this with many subdivisions, hence the ellaborate calculation!

A better program may be to approximate the entire area from 0 to 1 with a power series and just evaluate as many terms as you need for millionth place accuracy! OOO, this sounds good. So, if I need 1000 terms, just run 1000 processes shared over 25 PCs!

This would be a great and easy intro to the world of supercomputing for my high school computer science students!

TIA