Idea for a cheap "supercomputer"

[joohang]

E-commerce sites have a server farm and use load balancing techniques to distribute the transaction processes among different servers.

With a connection like Gigabit Ethernet, would it be possible to build a "workstation" farm where 2~10 (or more) P3 or Athlon SMP systems act as "one" workstation and render complex 3D scenes, etc?

Kinda like the idea of distributing computing but for workstations that require hours of CPU intensive jobs.

Please share your thoughts if this idea works or not. If such techniques already exist, I'd like to know where I can find more information about it.

 

[alpineranger]

They already have these things, Beowulf being the best known and readily avaliable. Keep in mind that the code has to be tailored to take full advantage of such setups, and this is very difficult to do.

 

[Lurch]

It works very well on macs and linux. I don't know about windows however. I would imagine that there is a tool out there that allows you to do it. It's just a matter of how much it costs.

 

[KpocAlypse]

hummm Beowolf maybe...

Allways liked that name. Just sounds bada$$. Were getting a beowolf setup on campus, no sure what the hell were going to do with it, and really have no flipping clue how it works. All i know is that the physics department is requesting 20 old machines, to do what? to calculate the number pi out to 50 gazillion digits?.. But the campus side ain't my department..

 

[joohang]

Any sites with info on this beowulf?

 

[conlan]

Heres one