HPC with linux and windows

[ashu_crazyboy1994]

hi! i just heard many things from people about clustering old computers to make one powerful machine i got two extra machines having p4 and are 32bit and an AMD (phenom ii x4 64bit) can i cluster them and can i share the processing power from both windows and Linux? cause i trans code a lot of vids and also generate rainbow tables and for both i use windows so is there anyway that on master machine i use windows while the nodes use Linux to serve me

[xurious]

You could. But the amount of work it'd take to set up probably isn't worth the hassle. You would be better off selling the two old p4's for 50-75 dollars each, buying a decent CUDA enabled card (or depending on how many free 16x pcie's you have and how big your PSU is, buying a few of them) and letting those go to town.

I can find 8800 GT's for around 35 dollars each. GTX 260's for roughly 100. These would chomp away at transcoding much faster than any set of p4's.

[ashu_crazyboy1994]

ya that would do for the transcoding stuff but i have many processor intensive work to do like generate rainbow tables there are tools that crack passwords using CUDA but to generate the tables i need more processing power so i would need those p4s.

any other ideas?