So, I was thinking of making a cluster, but wondered: what are the
practical uses of one?
I don't think you really mean practical here. perhaps "commonplace"?
I mean, you can't exactly run Windows on these
things,
but why do you equate practical with "runs windows"? a lot of the
wider computer world doesn't run windows. windows is mainly
a low-end desktop, low-end server ghetto. large, yes, but not the
best (or most "practical") by any measure.
and it looks like they're mostly for parallel computing of
complex algorithms.
do you mean parallel/complex makes beowulf of limited interest or niche?
Would an average Joe like me have a use for a cluster?
do you use any websites? any search engines? beowulf and related
technologies are all about scaling, so in a sense, anything big is
a beowulf. some may complain that this stretches the term, that
"grid" or "cloud" should be used instead, but it's all the same concept.
a beowulf is a cluster, normally of x86 commodity parts, normally for
compute-intensive research/engineering. a render farm is basically
the same but oriented towards making movies (IO intensive, but more
"embarassingly" parallel.) a grid means a cluster that's geographically
distributed and including multiple administrative domains (hence not
suitable for tightly-coupled parallelism.) a cloud is a grid-like
facility usually implemented on top of VMs.
google/amazon/yahoo/etc are all, in this sense, beowulf-like clusters.
windows-based beowulf-like clusters are still beowulf-like - they're just
knock-offs using a less appropriate OS. programs on clusters tend not
to be all that dependent on the "underware" (vs middleware) of the platform.
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