[Sheflug] Clustering

["Chris Johnson" <chris [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Anybody looked into clustering?

It occurred to me that even when people are doing fairly normal office tasks
their PCs are under utilised.  I found a knoppix distro called
ClusterKnoppix that seems to be a project where all PCs on a network work
cooperatively to acheive a goal of getting things done.

I might be way off here but if I have 10 People using 80% of their PC power
does that mean I should be able to add another 2 people using older PCs
running in the cluster and getting about the same performance?

Any comments welcome as I think its an interesting area especially for
schools where classroom PCs may be quite old but the new PCs in the suite
aren't being used all the time.  Classroom PCs could farm out tasks to the
suite to process extending the useful life of the older PCs.  As an
alternative to LTSP it seems to do away with the requirement of the central
(high spec) LTSP server.  However you lose the central point of admin.
Would it be possible (in theory) to use a cluster as an LTSP server?

I'm not so much after answers as ideas or places to look to find out more.

Chris Johnson
(No not that one, the other one!)
(running SUSE 8.2, 512MB PIII 600 (ish))





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