So, I have been working on a project at my high school, trying to convert a bunch of old donated computers into an openmosix cluster. I have been working off/on this project for several months. I had been simply installing gentoo on each machine, but since they don't pack much punch (pentium-pro's, II's) it takes a while.
My new goal is to make a bootable USB drive that will boot the old and newer machines and not touch their harddrives for an ad-hoc cluster. This way we can harness the faster machines that already are used for other purposes. Ideally the system would load, copy the contents into ram, and then release the USB drive.
The first major hurdle is when gentoo stopped support for openmosix (pulled it from portage). I already was stuck using a 2006.0 stage3 since openmosix doesn't support the c libraries in later releases. I'm also stuck using an older portage 2006.1, the last portage release that contained openmosix.
The second major hurdle is getting files. Some files that I need to emerge the system (gnuconfig for one) are not found on any of the servers anymore. Is there anyway/where I can still access these files to build a system or are they too old? Are there old gentoo source cd's? Would a package CD work?
I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with a project like this. Are there any more modern cluster solutions? I choose openmosix because it was more "blind" to clustering than other solutions that usually require compiling programs specifically for that cluster (Beouwolf, MPI, PVM).
Is this project doomed? Any comments/help would be greatly appreciated.
openmosix liveUSB
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- theworldisyours
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openmosix liveUSB
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I have used Quantian that has openMosix and it works but the problem with live CD is that it usually need quite a lot of RAM so I had some problems using it on 256 but it is ok with 512.
I put the Quantian CD image on WinXP machine that I had for other reasons (unbelievable enough) using that machine as a PXE server and booted 3 disk less clients from it.
Still I think you should keep to normal installations if you have low spec hardware.
Good luck
Martin
I put the Quantian CD image on WinXP machine that I had for other reasons (unbelievable enough) using that machine as a PXE server and booted 3 disk less clients from it.
Still I think you should keep to normal installations if you have low spec hardware.
Good luck
Martin