cubicle cloud computing

Question

I wondering is there anyone use company cubicle desktop or laptop to composite a cluster or cloud computing? For example, I'd like to use the following machines to composite a cluster:

• 20 desktop, each machine has 2~3G RAM, 1Tb Disk, linux machine
• 100M ethernet with internal IP.
• Sun(Oracle) Grid Engine

• no NAS

  How to make sure:

• high available

• high performance

  Is there anyone have similar experience to share?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Sure; in the early days of building clusters, you used to see the term NOW (Network of workstations) fairly commonly to describe this configuration.

There are problems with this configuration, of course. The slow network and likely long latencies make it unsuitable for some sorts of cluster computing workflows; but for other sorts it works just fine. Power is another consideration; desktop computers are nowhere near as power-efficient as specialized cluster nodes would be.

But the advantages are obvious -- you already have these machines, and can make further use of them.

The Condor project made its name in the NOW days by taking advantage of these sorts of configurations, although it has long since grown other capabilities, as well. One of its strengths in this type of situation is that it has very flexible rules for deciding when the computer is available for jobs and when it is not (eg, when someone sits down at it).