Server farm or cluster

[DJ 2501]

I have three spare boxes floating around and Im wanting to do some tests.

One box is a celeron 1.4ghz one is a dual pIII 800mhx each and the other is a amd x 500 mhz

Iv been reading up on using multiple computer in a network to act as one computer for super processing power.

I want to set this up and see, using tovid to encode and burn a dvd if using three computers as one will actually speed up the encoding process.

There are also someother things that Im looking into test. One would be using all the computers as a fast processor to act as a webserver that never lags and the other is to try to find a way to link all the computer together to act as one webserver. As sites get added and the disk space on all the computers fill up, i just add another computer and its processor and hard disks become part of the large computer and can be used.

Im reading up as much as possible on this but some help from people who have done this before would be awesome.

Does anybody know if what i want to do requires a special distro or program. Right now im running centos 4.4 final on all three machines because of cent's security and reliablity.

Any help on the tasks would be appriciated.

Sorry if there are spelling errors, Im shaking like a leaf right now for some reason.

[Roxoff]

This question has been asked before on here, but if anyone's tried this, they've not reported back yet as to their success. Clustering is something that I have a passing interest in - I've got lots of cpu power in my cellar, and it would be nice to have everything chugging as a single entity rather than seperate machines.

Read up on it and dont be afraid to ask questions here; I'd be very interested in how you get on.

[nwilkens]

Virtual Iron (www.virtualiron.com) used to do this. Then they decided to switch directions and go the Xen route (not that that was a bad idea).

However, they required high speed low latency interconnect.

http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/v...content_key=20
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/articl...50214152005354

It is a really cool way of doing it, and the demo I saw last year (or two) was really impressive. But, as I said they moved away from this. Although I know it was incorporated into the SLES9 SP3 distribution (the kernel modules at least), so there may be some hope.

[Juan Pablo]

Check openMosix http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/ , it only requieres a kernel patch