serverfarm, load distributing help?

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I am trying to get my old mac, a G4, to use my G5 and PC to share it's
cpu load because it is older and needs help. I need the G4 because it
is the cornerstone of my recording studio so I cant just upgrade to
the G5. I read server farms, clusters, whatever, can do this... so my
questions is does anybody know a good load distributing application or
method (preferably cheap and or free) like platform computing's LSF
(load sharing facility) to help me setup a simple 3 computer server
farm. I am running Debian on PC and Darwin (OSX) on mac. Would gigabit
ethernet be better for this? Any info would be really great.


Thanks!

 

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In article <f3386b3c.0411091840.19c889ac@posting.google.com>,
mentat <badmotofinger@gmail.com> wrote:
:I am trying to get my old mac, a G4, to use my G5 and PC to share it's
:cpu load because it is older and needs help. I need the G4 because it
:is the cornerstone of my recording studio so I cant just upgrade to
:the G5. I read server farms, clusters, whatever, can do this... so my
:questions is does anybody know a good load distributing application or
:method (preferably cheap and or free) like platform computing's LSF
load sharing facility) to help me setup a simple 3 computer server
:farm. I am running Debian on PC and Darwin (OSX) on mac.

OSX is a form of BSD, so probably LSF would compile fairly cleanly for it.
But your Debian system isn't going to be binary compatable with
your G4/G4, which could lead to problems, depending on exactly how
you set things up.

Your reference to not being able to upgrade your G4 leads me to suspect
that you are running a bunch of commercial applications on it.
Those commercial applications are probably not built with load sharing
in mind, in which case it wouldn't matter what you were running on the
other systems because the G4 wouldn't know to hand off any work.


:Would gigabit
:ethernet be better for this?

Frankly... No. Gigabit ethernet would help if you had tightly coupled
processes on each of the systems that were exchanging a lot of data.
I am not aware of any program that can take a random commercial binary
and automatically re-write it to do load distribution. There just
isn't much point in using a load distributing system without software
that is aware of the load distributing system.

I suppose it is possible in theory to substitute alternate versions
of dynamic shared libraries that farm off some of the work to other
machines; whether that would help or not would depend greatly on
how the binaries do their work.

One mechanism that one of our people has been mentioning to me
is OpenMosix (or at least that's how I assume it is spelt.)
--
'ignorandus (Latin): "deserving not to be known"'
-- Journal of Self-Referentialism

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.dcom.lans.ethernet (More info?)

badmotofinger@gmail.com (mentat) wrote in message news:<f3386b3c.0411091840.19c889ac@posting.google.com>...
> I am trying to get my old mac, a G4, to use my G5 and PC to share it's
> cpu load because it is older and needs help. I need the G4 because it
> is the cornerstone of my recording studio so I cant just upgrade to
> the G5. I read server farms, clusters, whatever, can do this... so my
> questions is does anybody know a good load distributing application or
> method (preferably cheap and or free) like platform computing's LSF
> (load sharing facility) to help me setup a simple 3 computer server
> farm. I am running Debian on PC and Darwin (OSX) on mac. Would gigabit
> ethernet be better for this? Any info would be really great.
>
>
> Thanks!

These days, people tend to use SGE (Gridengine) instead of LSF, since
SGE is free, more reliable, and it is opensource.

http://gridengine.sunsource.net


But for your case, batch processing may not work, since you need to do
realtime work, and I correct?

-Ron