Hi In my limited experience practically all clusters, computational or otherwise, have the end users removed away from the cluster by only providing them access to the head node, which controls the various jobs and scheduleing, and sometimes not even direct access to that either.
An LTSP installation would allow for this segregation and also all the other various benefits posted before. Depending on the type and nature of the computational work, the University may be able to rent time on a much larger cluster than you already have / plan to have. This gives you the added benefit of hardware expense for the terminals only as opposed to the mega bucks for the hardware, infrastructure and maintenance of your own cluster. If I understand your original message correctly, your HoD wants to use the User's desktops to provide both the Desktop and use the spare CPU cycles for doing the computations. Although this system works, and there are Open Source implementations of it, I would strongly recommend against such an installation mainly because that you have no control over the end user desktop. There are a number of other issues with this setup as well, such as how to stop power cycling whilst a user's desktop has a computational job running on it; depending on the computations required, the network infrastructure may be overwhelmed without having two NICs on each desktop linking to the users network and computational network; maintaining security and validity of jobs etc. HTH Cheers Ian -----Original Message----- From: Frank Cox [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 14 October 2008 16:50 To: [email protected] Cc: Gudmund Areskoug Subject: Re: [Ltsp-discuss] Thin clients a failure? I need to defend it.....help me plz On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:56:54 +0200 Gudmund Areskoug <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I have no personal story of running CPU- and/or RAM-heavy applications > on an LTSP server, but I remember reading about spreading the load in > various combinations, both on this list and on the K12LTSP site. I think I mentioned here not long ago that I recently set up a second machine to act as another server for the paper that I do some work for. Now one machine does just the RIP and creates the plates for the press while a second machine does everything else. With just one server, the network was on its knees on the days when the RIP was running. A second server means that everybody's happy and can get their work done. We use Neoware Capio 600-series terminals with Centos 5 and LTSP 4.2. -- MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com DRY CLEANER BUSINESS FOR SALE ~ http://www.canadadrycleanerforsale.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.freenode.net
