On Wed, 18 Dec 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'd like to do motion detection using 4 cameras connected to an AXIS
> 2400 Camera server
> (http://www.axis.com/products/camera_servers/videoserver.htm). I already
> do this on 2 cameras using motion (http://motion.sourceforge.net/) on a
> linux box, but my two motion processes consume about half a CPU each
> (yes it may be configured in order to use less, but I want to keep my
> confiugration as it's now) and the 2 new cameras which are coming make
> me think about an alternative solution thant buy a additionnal CPU and
> disks to store MPEGS.
>
> My question is: Is it useful to have a linux cluster (e.g. with minimum
> 2 * Intel PIII machines) running these motion processes ? Do you think
> this might be interesting to do ? Is it a good use of cluster ?
Running a program on one processor is no problem -- you don't really need
a cluster for that. Now if you had run consistently run N programs on N
processors (or N/2 -- but let's just call it N in this discussion, for
simplicity's sake), having a cluster of some kind might be helpful for the
configuration management kinds of issues -- i.e., be able to upgrade all
your software/hardware simultaneously, install updates, etc. So if N > 1,
then having a "cluster" of some kind (with associated management tools)
can be helpful in keeping it all running, etc.
But from your description, it doesn't sound like you have much (any?)
interactive use, so batch scheduling probably isn't a requirement. Hence,
you might not need all the bells and whistles that are typically
associated with high performance computing clusters, but that's no big
deal -- *removing* software is generally pretty easy. :)
So it sounds like you really just need N machines for N running processes
(where N > 1).
To go to anything more interesting/compute intensive (e.g., 2*N machines
for N processes), your software has to be "cluster-aware" such that it
knows how to run on multiple machines and/or CPUs. This typically
requires that the software authors specifically code for parallelism (in
at least one of several available forms: threading, MPI, PVM, etc.). I
don't know anything about that video processing software, so I have no
idea whether those packages are parallel-capable or not.
Hope that helps.
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} [EMAIL PROTECTED]
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
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