I'm sick of tossing out old computers, and really haven't ever needed to use them for low-end projects. Every few years, though, it seems as if I run up against the limits of the reasonably powerful system I built a few years back. So I'm thinking of setting up a cluster using openmosix. I'm very new to clustering, and only recently (yesterday) started researching it, so I'd like to make sure my reasoning is sound before I start doing something like this.
I'm currently using my box heavily as a digital audio workstation. I want to do realtime mixing of inputs, as well as effect processing and rendering of the finished tracks. Simultaneous compression to Vorbis and flac would be kinda cool, too. :) Most of my DAW apps are multithreaded, so I'm hoping to take advantage of process migration for the realtime work. So I've been delving into how clusters work. While it'd be convenient and cheaper to just string together a couple old boxes, I move a lot and really don't want to lug around 3-4 towers, reconnect the LAN, etc. So I'm pondering switching to rackmounts. Problem is, I know very little about rackmounts. I priced some cases on pricewatch, and they seemed somewhat expensive ($90 for a 1u.) Would rackmounts be the only way to go for portability? How difficult is assembling rackmounts, or would it be better to buy them preassembled? Are there any good venders of inexpensive rackmounts, especially as I'm not necessarily looking into one massive powerhouse, but several smaller units? I'm also pondering the logistics of how to allocate resources. My initial thought was to start with one, extremely powerful node which I'd install openmosix on at a later date when I wanted to expand. Then, in a couple years when I'm buying that used 6 GHz box which I've doubtlessly been eying by then, I wouldn't need to toss out my old hardware, and when the rack is eventually filled, I can toss the least powerful node and not feel all that bad. But I'm wondering if maybe it's better to buy several lower-power systems? Also, reading the openmosix docs indicates that separate filesystems need to be installed on each node, though MFS can eventually be used to link common directories. I can see the advantages of this, but how difficult would it be to install a fairly massive, fast scsi drive on the master, while booting all slaves disklessly? Would the MFS/disk rw hits substantially slow the cluster? It just seems as if administering every node separately is vastly inefficient in systems where all nodes are under one person's control. _______________________________________________ Siglinux mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.utacm.org/mailman/listinfo/siglinux
