Quote Originally Posted by A. Jorge Garcia
Now, I'm installing a new network for my Computer Science students next year. I was thinking of using the thin-client tip elsewhere in the forum, but clustering has potential. OK, so what if I cluster 25 Pentium IV PC's, each running at 2Ghz with 512MB RAM and 100GB hdds. Will this run, say, one process as if it were a single 50Ghz machine with 12.5GB RAM and 2.5TB storage space????

TIA,
Hehe! That would be pretty nice wouldn't it. Storage space will not be distributed. RAM will not be distributed. Processes will be distributed.

Here's a quote from the openmosix homepage.

openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering. This kernel extension turns a network of ordinary IA-32 computers into a supercomputer for Linux applications.

Once you have installed openMosix, the nodes in the cluster start talking to one another and the cluster adapts itself to the workload. Processes originating from any one node, if that node is too busy compared to others, can migrate to any other node. openMosix continuously attempts to optimize the resource allocation.

We achieve this with a kernel patch for Linux, creating a reliable, fast and cost-efficient SSI clustering platform that is linearly scalable and adaptive. With openMosix’ Auto Discovery, a new node can be added while the cluster is running and the cluster will automatically begin to use the new resources.

There is no need to program applications specifically for openMosix. Since all openMosix extensions are inside the kernel, every Linux application automatically and transparently benefits from the distributed computing concept of openMosix. The cluster behaves much as does a Symmetric Multi-Processor, but this solution scales to well over a thousand nodes which can themselves be SMPs.
Sounds pretty nice eh?

Sounds like an openmosix cluster would greatly benifit your classroom project.

Here are a couple of other links that I found that might be helpful to you. They combine openmosix with the Linux Terminal Server Project.

http://www.lpmo.edu/~daniau/ltsp-mosix/
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/ltsp-omr4-1.html

If you eventually decide to do something like this, let us know how it goes.