Building my own supercomputer with old PC/Mac boxes?

[Littleodie914]

Hey guys, I was reading the post concerning the fact that team MacRumors.com will soon be caught by the "Dutch Cows" or whatever they're called (I'm too lazy to look up the post, and those braggers don't deserve their name to be spelled right anyways. 😉 ), and I was wondering if I could put a few of our old PCs and Macs to good use.

Individually, they're probably all too slow to finish a WU within the deadline time, so I was wondering if there was a way to hook them together and share processing power. I've done a bit of research, and have pretty much come to the conclusion that Apple's XGrid won't allow "parallel processing" to occur... (If those are correct terms, I know not.)

Are there any other solutions? I've heard rumors of Java applets that will do it, etc., but am wondering if there are any sure-fire ways to get this to work. The PC's can be Windows or Linux, but I'd like the Macs to stay Mac. 🙂

Thanks in advance!

 

[jim.]

Just throwing this out...

Have you looked into Beowulf clusters? I think it accomplishes what you want to do. I'm not sure if software has to be specially written to take advantage of it like Xgrid. You would also have to have some knowledge of linux to proceed. Google can give you more info.

Edit: You want the macs to stay osx, so this may not be a good solution. (I should read more closely)

Jim