Re: Linking Machines

[Mitch Blevins <mblevin@debian.org>]

Sean P. Mason wrote:
> > GNU/Linux wont really make several machines act as one.  Most of the
> > clustering capabilities come from the software, which is able to divide
> > it's work up and distribute it over several machines.  This is specialized
> > (mostly scientific) software that is not going to speed up your
> > (for instance) web browsing.
> 
> If I were to take this option, what benefits would I notice?  For example,
> would I be able to run a single program off of all the machines
> simultaneously, thus increasing its speed?  Or would the best I could do
> be to run separate programs on separate machines?

Separate programs on seperate machines.
Unless you get (or write) a specialized program meant to be able
to run distributed.

> > What you can do is run one program on machine A and another on machine B
> > (showing them both on the same terminal) and get the benefits of
> > multitasking without having one machine take the load of both programs.
> > But I'm not sure how effective this will be on those 386's.  The
> > memory is a little low.
> 
> Unfortunately, the memory is a bit low.  The best machine of the bunch
> will be somewhat decent, however.  Anyway, this option sounds interesting.
> To do this, would I have to specify which machine to run each program on
> every time I run a program?  That could get a little tedious.

You could always automate (via scripts) which programs run on which
machine.  But I honestly don't see you getting any productivity benefits
from this setup (as opposed to running everything on the 486).
The money you would spend on network cards could be better off spent
with more memory, etc.

It could be a learning experience with networking, tho...