This always sounds good, some romantic notion of a "cluster", imagining a rack full of pc's in orchestration for some high-performance computing application, but in the real world, apps rarely work that way.

First, you need software that can take advantage of processing/rendering against multiple nodes... Most monolithic apps simply aren't built for this, particularly most desktop apps. Most apps can't even take advantage of multiple GPU's in the same box, let alone different boxes. My current desktop has 20 cores and 40 threads, and I still find all the time various programs will still peg only one CPU, where they're simply not built to scale horizontally across threads still, even within one system. Things like databases, graphics rendering, and other very focused target applications do this, but almost all are priced beyond a hobbyist's means, and most simply aren't necessary, until they are and you have a business justification for the cost. Oracle RAC, Maya, Hadoop, etc come to mind here, or custom stuff the likes of NASA/CIA probably developed in-house for crazy things only they need to process.

Second, you tend to need fairly robust networking generally. I have customers that actually do this with clusters of HP Vertica and Aerospike databases, and are in the process of moving to 25/100gb low-latency switching to feed their beast. What's the point of tons of processing if the network can't pass data between them effectively? Another large financial customer used Infiniband (IB) switching, another exotic/expensive alternative to ethernet for large processing clusters of wall street stock ticker feeds that come in at 10gbps speeds for processing among clustered hosts interconnected at 40gb IB ports. You also tend to have a network "load-balancer" appliance, hardware or software, directing connections and traffic to many systems within said cluster of many servers, which is most common in big web services farms. Think netflix, or amazon when you go to www.amazon.com, that really hits one of 50 (or more) web servers, via a load balancer.

Third, as others have mentioned, consider the orchestration required to deploy and manage the systems. In theory, systems are brought up on-demand as needed, sometimes like with docker, being built on the fly from scratch, used, and destroyed when done, all through automation. If you have 50 servers in a cluster, how do you keep them all exact copies of each other perfectly?

These days when you see a rack of servers, often what you're seeing are them running something like VMware, Openstack, or other virtualization, that really just runs a bunch of virtual system doing different things. They may have 50 (or well more) different windows and linux guest systems all running across a "cluster" of 3 to 30 virtualization servers, mostly because you can only fit so much processing and ram into one system, but also for redundancy. It's almost never 1 application making use of 3+ boxes at once how you would imagine someone like Disney renders their cgi movies.

HTH!

-mb

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 9:01 PM Harold Hartley <wheelie207@ownmail.net> wrote:

I was thinking having the processing power and all the ram combined so it runs like a single computer to do graphic animations.

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 20:56, Kevin Fries wrote:
A cluster and a cloud are semantic difference

Kevin Fries

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On Apr 16, 2019, at 9:40 PM, Harold Hartley <wheelie207@ownmail.net> wrote:
> It says openstack used to build cloud. I don’t want a cloud.
>
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 20:38, Stephen Partington wrote:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack
>>
>> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 8:22 PM Harold Hartley <wheelie207@ownmail.net> wrote:
>> > __
>> > I’ve heard of Beowulf clusters but not sure I’ve heard or read about open stack. Who makes open stack.
>> >
>> > On Tue, Apr 16, 2019, at 20:19, Stephen Partington wrote:
>> >> this depends on what you want it to be doing. you can do something with OpenStack and that technically is a cluster. or you could get old school and look into beowolf clusters.
>> >>
>> >> On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 7:42 PM Harold Hartley <wheelie207@ownmail.net> wrote:
>> >> > __
>> >> > I’m looking at building a cluster and I know there are different types. I haven’t fully decided on what I would be using it for.
>> >> > Well, I have 4 computers about 3 or 4 years old and all have i5 processing with 8 gigs ram in each. I am not sure what size hard drives I want in them. I am looking at doing animations making my own small video movie like and then post on my blog. Even thought of other uses as well.
>> >> > Would anyone have an idea what type of cluster I should go with. Thanks
>> >> >
>> >> > --
>> >> > Harold Hartley
>> >> > 17632 N. 5th place
>> >> > Phoenix, AZ 85022
>> >> > wheelie207@ownmail.net
>> >> >
>> >> >
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>> >> Stephen
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