Re: Linking Machines
On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Mitch Blevins wrote: Sean P. Mason wrote: I was wondering. . . I have a bunch of old machines, and I was wondering if it was possible to link them all together to act as a single machine under Linux. I can't seem to find any information elsewhere thus far. I have six 386 Sx-16s with a meg of RAM and 40 megs of space each, and one machine around a 486 Dx with 8 megs ram and 200 megs of a hard drive. Take a look at: http://www.ssc.com/lg/issue30/vrenios.html http://www.ssc.com/lg/issue33/vrenios.html These are a pair of articles from the Linux Gazzette, an online magazine about Linux. They're about CHAOS, the CHeap Array of Obsolete Systems, sort of a poor-man's Beowulf. If you want to learn about parallel and distributed processing, this may be for you. The author has hardware very similar to yours. A couple of problems: an extremely specialized Linux can be forced to boot in 1MB of RAM. It will *not* be able to do anything even remotely useful after that, though. 2MB is the absolute bare minimum needed to approach usability. When you get to 4MB, it's tight but you can start doing useful things, though perhaps not graphics. If you can get 6-8MB of RAM into them you'll be happy. Hopefully these 386's take SIMMS; you should be able to get a few used 1MB SIMMs pretty cheap these days. A 40MB hard drive is just about sufficient. I've installed on a 386 with 6MB of RAM and two 40MB hard drives without too much trouble. One of the nice things about Linux is you can set up NFS. The 386's can have just the bare minimum installed on their drives, and then mount disk space from the 486 with whatever other software you want. The other nice thing about Linux is that you don't need keyboards and monitors for all the 386's after the initial install. You can log into them remotely and do everything you could do with a direct keyboard and screen. GNU/Linux wont really make several machines act as one. Most of the clustering capabilities come from the software, which is able to divide it's work up and distribute it over several machines. This is specialized (mostly scientific) software that is not going to speed up your (for instance) web browsing. That's right. If you write your own programs to take advantage of the network of 386's, you'll benefit, but otherwise you're probably best to stick with just the 486. You'd be surprised what you can do with a 486 and Linux... Sincerely, Ray Ingles(248) 377-7735[EMAIL PROTECTED] Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this? -- Woody Allen
Re: Linking Machines
Sean P. Mason wrote: I was wondering. . . I have a bunch of old machines, and I was wondering if it was possible to link them all together to act as a single machine under Linux. I can't seem to find any information elsewhere thus far. I have six 386 Sx-16s with a meg of RAM and 40 megs of space each, and one machine around a 486 Dx with 8 megs ram and 200 megs of a hard drive. GNU/Linux wont really make several machines act as one. Most of the clustering capabilities come from the software, which is able to divide it's work up and distribute it over several machines. This is specialized (mostly scientific) software that is not going to speed up your (for instance) web browsing. What you can do is run one program on machine A and another on machine B (showing them both on the same terminal) and get the benefits of multitasking without having one machine take the load of both programs. But I'm not sure how effective this will be on those 386's. The memory is a little low. However, if all these machines have network cards, you have the perfect platform to learn about networking. Set it up as 2 or 3 subnets and have one of your machines route between them. I guess it all depends... what do you want to do? -Mitch
Re: Linking Machines
GNU/Linux wont really make several machines act as one. Most of the clustering capabilities come from the software, which is able to divide it's work up and distribute it over several machines. This is specialized (mostly scientific) software that is not going to speed up your (for instance) web browsing. If I were to take this option, what benefits would I notice? For example, would I be able to run a single program off of all the machines simultaneously, thus increasing its speed? Or would the best I could do be to run separate programs on separate machines? What you can do is run one program on machine A and another on machine B (showing them both on the same terminal) and get the benefits of multitasking without having one machine take the load of both programs. But I'm not sure how effective this will be on those 386's. The memory is a little low. Unfortunately, the memory is a bit low. The best machine of the bunch will be somewhat decent, however. Anyway, this option sounds interesting. To do this, would I have to specify which machine to run each program on every time I run a program? That could get a little tedious. Thanks! --- Sean Mason
Re: Linking Machines
Sean P. Mason wrote: GNU/Linux wont really make several machines act as one. Most of the clustering capabilities come from the software, which is able to divide it's work up and distribute it over several machines. This is specialized (mostly scientific) software that is not going to speed up your (for instance) web browsing. If I were to take this option, what benefits would I notice? For example, would I be able to run a single program off of all the machines simultaneously, thus increasing its speed? Or would the best I could do be to run separate programs on separate machines? Separate programs on seperate machines. Unless you get (or write) a specialized program meant to be able to run distributed. What you can do is run one program on machine A and another on machine B (showing them both on the same terminal) and get the benefits of multitasking without having one machine take the load of both programs. But I'm not sure how effective this will be on those 386's. The memory is a little low. Unfortunately, the memory is a bit low. The best machine of the bunch will be somewhat decent, however. Anyway, this option sounds interesting. To do this, would I have to specify which machine to run each program on every time I run a program? That could get a little tedious. You could always automate (via scripts) which programs run on which machine. But I honestly don't see you getting any productivity benefits from this setup (as opposed to running everything on the 486). The money you would spend on network cards could be better off spent with more memory, etc. It could be a learning experience with networking, tho...
Re: Linking Machines
Are there any well known programs out there that will let me run processes distributed, or will I have to do a whole load of digging? =) I think I might just try that out, if I can manage to find the right software for it. --- Sean Mason
Re: Linking Machines
Sean P. Mason wrote: Are there any well known programs out there that will let me run processes distributed, or will I have to do a whole load of digging? =) If you want to run programs on separate machines and display them on just one, then telnet and X work just fine. But if you want the same program to run on several machines at once, you won't find any for everyday activites (mail, news, web, editing, etc). If you want to write your own, there is a neat framework called DIPC that allows inter-process communication across machines, using the familiar IPC mechanism. You can find this and others at http://sal.kachinatech.com -Mitch
Re: Linking Machines
I though that beowulf project, clustering PCs, and most of the effort was about such a process management. http://cesdis1.gsfc.nasa.gov/beowulf/ Daegyu On Tue, Dec 08, 1998 at 10:40:38PM -0500, Mitch Blevins wrote: Sean P. Mason wrote: Are there any well known programs out there that will let me run processes distributed, or will I have to do a whole load of digging? =) If you want to run programs on separate machines and display them on just one, then telnet and X work just fine. But if you want the same program to run on several machines at once, you won't find any for everyday activites (mail, news, web, editing, etc). If you want to write your own, there is a neat framework called DIPC that allows inter-process communication across machines, using the familiar IPC mechanism. You can find this and others at http://sal.kachinatech.com -Mitch -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: Linking Machines
On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Mitch Blevins wrote: Sean P. Mason wrote: I was wondering. . . I have a bunch of old machines, and I was wondering if it was possible to link them all together to act as a single machine under Linux. I can't seem to find any information elsewhere thus far. I have six 386 Sx-16s with a meg of RAM and 40 megs of space each, and one machine around a 486 Dx with 8 megs ram and 200 megs of a hard drive. GNU/Linux wont really make several machines act as one. Most of the clustering capabilities come from the software, which is able to divide it's work up and distribute it over several machines. This is specialized (mostly scientific) software that is not going to speed up your (for instance) web browsing. What you can do is run one program on machine A and another on machine B (showing them both on the same terminal) and get the benefits of multitasking without having one machine take the load of both programs. But I'm not sure how effective this will be on those 386's. The memory is a little low. However, if all these machines have network cards, you have the perfect platform to learn about networking. Set it up as 2 or 3 subnets and have one of your machines route between them. I guess it all depends... what do you want to do? ^^ today? Oh, sorry. Wrong thread :-) -- Kent West [EMAIL PROTECTED] KC5ENO - Amateur Radio: When all else fails. Linux - Finally! A real OS for the Intel PC! Life is an ongoing classroom. - Capt. James T. Kirk, Dreadnought
Re: Linking Machines
I've taken a look at this Beowulf thing (quite new to me) and it seems a bit. . . cryptic. It doesn't really say anything that will help me out on the page. Does anyone out there use or know a lot about Beowulf? If someone does, please drop me mail so we can chat a bit =) Thanks! --- Sean Mason On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, [iso-8859-1] ±è ´ë ±Ô wrote: I though that beowulf project, clustering PCs, and most of the effort was about such a process management. http://cesdis1.gsfc.nasa.gov/beowulf/ Daegyu On Tue, Dec 08, 1998 at 10:40:38PM -0500, Mitch Blevins wrote: Sean P. Mason wrote: Are there any well known programs out there that will let me run processes distributed, or will I have to do a whole load of digging? =) If you want to run programs on separate machines and display them on just one, then telnet and X work just fine. But if you want the same program to run on several machines at once, you won't find any for everyday activites (mail, news, web, editing, etc). If you want to write your own, there is a neat framework called DIPC that allows inter-process communication across machines, using the familiar IPC mechanism. You can find this and others at http://sal.kachinatech.com -Mitch -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Subject: Re: Linking Machines
I've been looking around the Beowulf sites for several days now. If you follow ALL the links, you will eventually find the useful info. Basically, Beowulf is used to enable several Linux boxes to behave as one super-computer. That's the good news. The bad news is, this is only useful if you are running programmes specially written to run on parallel processors. How the system would behave if you just kept opening several, sequential programmes, I'm not sure if it would automatically farm the different programmes to the different nodes or not. You can, as noted in earlier E-Mails, manually spawn these out yourself, but that is a bit like buying ten copies of the same CD to get a 10% discount. You sound like someone who just wants a plug-and-pray type system, so most of this mould be out of your league. If, on the other hand, you would like to try to programme your own concurrent code to utilise this Beowulf system, the follow the links from Beowulf to the other super-computer sites and you can find a wealth of info on building the system, programming the code and build your own little super-computer. At one site I saw a Beowulf system of 16, '486 PC's networked together that had achieved 1.3 GFOPs! That's 1.3 Billion Floating-point Operations per Second! Quite reasonable from PC's that can be bought for less than £150.00 @. This is just about the limit of my knowledge on the subject, but I am planning to start piecing together my own Beowulf system soon. Cheers, John Gay
