Home Mac-Cluster Set-up???

[hartleymartin]

Can anyone please recommend a way of setting up a home mac-cluster? I am aware that X-Grid was used for a while with X-Serve and the like, but this was discontinued several OSX versions ago.

I have a Mac Pro 3,1 (8-cores @ 3.0GHz) and a Mac Pro 1,1 (going to be upgraded to 2,1) and I would like to experiment with networking these and a few other macs (MacMini G4, PowerMac G5, a couple of laptops) into a cluster to see what I would get.

I have no particular purpose for it, I would just like to see how it is set-up and what the possibilities are. Perhaps I'll write a program to find prime numbers and see how many it can find in an hour on a cluster computer?

 

[128keaton]

Can anyone please recommend a way of setting up a home mac-cluster? I am aware that X-Grid was used for a while with X-Serve and the like, but this was discontinued several OSX versions ago.

I have a Mac Pro 3,1 (8-cores @ 3.0GHz) and a Mac Pro 1,1 (going to be upgraded to 2,1) and I would like to experiment with networking these and a few other macs (MacMini G4, PowerMac G5, a couple of laptops) into a cluster to see what I would get.

I have no particular purpose for it, I would just like to see how it is set-up and what the possibilities are. Perhaps I'll write a program to find prime numbers and see how many it can find in an hour on a cluster computer?

now I'm interested too. I'd look into RNN stuff.

 

[hartleymartin]

I'm not keen on the idea of having to go back to OSX 10.7.5 on my Macs to use XGrid.

 

[flyrod]

distributed.net has clients that would work on your diverse cluster. set up one with a shared folder, run the other clients out of it to share the work files.

Also, there used to be software called pooch iirc, that would use a cluster and quicktime to speed up encodes and such.

 

[spiffers]

You could run VMWare ESXi cluster, and then virtualise VMs on top of the cluster. Its great for failsafe and redundancy.

 

[Daniel Santos]

I have four classic mac pros, networked toghether. They are not a cluster per-se, but they hold a set of linux virtual machines running CentOs 7. The whole setup is a web application that has load balancing on the web, cache, and database layers across three mac pro's.

The remaining mac pro accepts connections from the internet. It then loadbalances to three VMs with the webapplication. Each web application server in turn connects to load balanced memcache and cassandra VMs

The VMs run on Virtual Box and Vagrant. For software configuration of the VMs I use Puppet, with the master running on a VM in the less powerful macpro (the 3.1).

All the mac pro's are connected to a Gigabit ethernet switch, where the internet router is also connected.

 

[flyrod]

You could run VMWare ESXi cluster, and then virtualise VMs on top of the cluster. Its great for failsafe and redundancy.

I have a small cluster of mac mini G4's that used to be for distributed compiling. Would they work for any of the newer VM software?

What about a software RAID setup? Each mini has a 80GB disk, so it could be nice to use the combined space as a backup RAID.