The USGS here in Flagstaff has their systems configured to allow
distributed computing (plus many other really cool things). If extra
processing power/RAM is needed for a task that will be run over the
weekend they pop boot CDs into all the idle workstations in the building
and fire them up - storage is not done on the workstations but on NAS
boxes. Monday morning the computer is rebooted into whatever its regular
configuration is for that user (mix of Win, Suse and Darwin) and off
they go.
Charlie Bullen wrote:
> Hello all, Its a good news bad news thing. First the bad news.
>
> Once again, human error triumphs. I had intended on giving a demo of
> linux clustering to the members of an windows XP pro class that I am
> attending at PVCC.
>
> Based on info I had, the computers in the classroom should have worked
> with PXE booting. In the event that they wouldn't I decided to bring
> another computer that I know works. Unfortunatley, the classroom
> computers wouldn't boot and I brought the wrong power cord for my backup
> computer, so I couldn't get a cluster going.
>
> Now for the good news. There was MUCH interest generated. The interested
> parties were the instructor of the class, the night time sys admin of
> the PVCC computer lab, and 3 class members, one of whom is a sys admin
> with the Tempe school district. None of them had ever seem linux in
> action. I did have my laptop, running redhat 9.0 to show them and also I
> did boot up the clusterKnoppix disk so that the could see a linux desktop.
>
> For the first attempt at this demo, I had to lobby to be allowed to do
> it. After last night, I was invited by the instructor to try again next
> week.
>
> 2 of my fellow students are going to bring their laptops with them. I
> will prepare boot disks from romomatic.net so that we can add them to
> the cluster. I am also going to create boot disks for the classroom PCs
> with romomatic. Lastly I am going to bring my spare computer again with
> the proper cords. We WILL have a cluster going next week.
>
> The person most interested was the Tempe sysadmin, he really sees some
> benifits in clustering, manily in how the CPU cycles and memory of
> older, less powerfull machines can be aggregated to give each user much
> more power than they otherwise would have.
>
> In my first post I did make some negative remarks regarding windows.
> This, I realize was inappropriate. Regardless of whether a person
> percives the quality of MS operating systems as good or bad, I now
> realize that this is not the forum for such comments. I am going to
> restict my further comments on this forum to linux and keep my views on
> MS, whether positive or negative, to myself.
>
> As always, any comments, criticisms or recommendations are welcome.
>
> Charlie
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