Clustering 2 Mac Pros

Ok I am about to embark upon the seemingly difficult task of clustering 2 mac pros together. However, the caveat is that I have to play musical hard drives. Here are the details:

Mac 1:

Mac Pro, 2x3 GHz Dual_Core Intel Xenon
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM RAM
Tiger OSX 10.4.11
HD Bay 1- 300 GB
HD Bay 2- 465 GB

Mac 2:

Mac Pro, 2x2.6 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xenon
6 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Snow Leopard OSX 10.6.2
HD Bay 1- 640 GB

I have one copy of Final Cut Studio that I plan on having on Mac 2 as my main editing station. Because Mac 2 is my main workstation and Mac 1 will be the slave, I want to put the 300 GB HDD from Mac 1 into Mac 2. I want to install Snow Leopard and FCS2 onto the 300 GB drive and use the 640 GB strictly for storage and capture scratch. Well currently that 300 GB is running Tiger on Mac 1 and the 640GB is running Snow Leopard on Mac 2.

So it seems that for Mac 2, I would have to format the 300 GB on Mac 1, then move it to Mac 2 (bay 1), format the 640 GB on Mac 2 (move to bay 2), then install Snow Leopard and FCS2 on the 300 GB (bay 2).

And for Mac 1, move the 465GB drive to bay 1 and install Tiger on it.

Once that process is done, I think I will be ready to attempt to cluster them using Mac 2 as the main workstation and Mac 1 as a slave for its processing power.

I have never done either of these things and wanted to know if my presumed steps above are the best way to do it or if anyone knows of a better, faster, or smarter way to do all this.

Thanks!

 

There is a way to do it through Qmaster that comes with Final Cut Studio. It allows you to create a cluster and assign one machine as the main workstation and another machine as a slave within a workgroup. You can link the 2 via Firewire or Ethernet. Qmaster allows you to set how many cores each machine using.

Once this is set up, whenever you send a video to compressor, Qmaster will divide the workload between the all computers in the work group based on the number of cores each is set to use.

 

All data that I need off of all drives are backed up on a server so formatting them is not a problem. I just don't know how to format a drive that has the OS on it. Because disk utility is on the same disk its formatting, it doesn't seem like that would work.

As for the xgrid wannabe, maybe so but I don't have the funds to set up that system but with what i do have currently, i know it can be done.

 

Great, thank you very much!

The SL installation is going smoothly on Mac 2, however Mac 1 will not boot from the Tiger OSX install disc. I hold C whenever I turn the computer on and it sounds like the cd drive starts spinning but it just comes to a plain blue screen and stays that way. I don't think the disc is bad because it just came back from the apple repair center and they used the same disc to put the OS back on it.