Creating a PowerMac g4 Cluster

[Brihomajax]

I recently accuired 2 PowerMacs 1 for free and the other for cheap. One is a Dual 450mhz and the other is a Dual 500mhz. So now I have 2 dual 450mhz and a dual 500mhz. Is it possible to make a three g4 baby cluster similar to what they did with the giant G5 cluster at Virginia Tech?

• How would I do it?
• Would it harness the power of all of the processors?
• Would it only be useful only for large computations, or would it speed up any and all tasks and apps?

I am just a designer, and think it would be a fun thing to try to do.

I have visions of making some sort of antiquated giant beast of a mac. At the very least I figure I could use the three of them together as a heater in the winter!

Any tips or comments are appreciated!

May the Force be with you.
And also with you.

 

[KingYaba]

xgrid?

 

[yellow]

Xgrid.

http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid.html
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/xgrid/
http://www.apple.com/acg/
http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/hpc/xgrid_intro.html

 

[Lord Blackadder]

I always thought this would be a neat idea myself...except when I was thinking about doing it the year was 1994 and I had 8 IBM XT desktops that I was going to try to do it with...

My guess is that it will be doable, especially using Linux, but not necessarily easy or even fun. It mostly depends on the software being able to take advantantage of the multiple Macs.

 

[tipdrill407]

I'm not expert with this, but I don't think a designer would see any benefit in doing this. I think this type of setup is more for the scientific community. Also, I think the setup is done through a command line. If you want to setup Xgrid with a GUI u need 10.4 Server.

 

[Chinc3ee]

RE: Creating a PowerMac g4 Cluster [Late Response]

Sorry for the late response, just signed up for this forum. If you want to set up a compute cluster, all you need is a basic understanding of message passing, fortran or c/c++. It’s probably easiest to go with something like LAM/MPI since most of the things you need are all included in one package. You can probably use Mac OS as your environment, however, its simpler to use debian linux or some other linux distro. I have 14 G4's that I use on a regular basis for computational research in population dynamics. They are excellent machine’s, they do swallow a bit too much power through. I recommend these titles if you need to get a cluster assembled. I read these and they are just invaluable for people who need high performance computing for little or no $$.

Beowulf Cluster Computing with Linux (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine: A Users' Guide and Tutorial for Network Parallel Computing (Scientific and Engineering Computation)

How to Build a Beowulf: A Guide to the Implementation and Application of PC Clusters (Scientific and Engineering Computation)