This is a rainy day project for those long winter days and as such moves
on very slowly. I've got 486 class PC's coming out of my ears here so the obvious thing to do is to build a cluster out of them. I will be using a Cyrix PR200 based machine as the master node and four or more 486's as compute nodes.

A what?
Basically speaking a cluster is a group of interconnected computers working together as a single, integrated computing resource. Clearly this is going to be purely for my own education and entertainment as a cluster of 486 machines is not going to win any awards for speed!

Hardware
So far I have allocated five boxes for the cluster although I have a couple more that could well find their way onto the pile. The current machines and their specifications are listed below.
The network is 10Base2 and is separate from my main network although I may install a second network card in the Master Node to bridge to the main net.

Software
I have started installing Debian Gnu/Linux and openMosix on the five machines. openMosix transforms a cluster of PC's to run almost like an SMP machine. It continuously monitors the activities of running processes and evenly distributes them to take advantage of the best available resources.

Unlike PVM or LAM based clusters you don't have to write or modify applications specifically for the cluster. openMosix works transparently with existing applications by migrating individual processes to the least used or best system available in the cluster with the caveat that each process can only run on one processor so only applications that use more than one process can actually make use of the other nodes.

Links:

• openMOSIX
• openMosixview - cluster management GUI
• openMosix HOWTO
• Applications that are known to work with openMosix and those which don't
• MOSIX
• How to Build a Beowulf Cluster
• Beowulf FAQ
• LAM-MPI
• SCMS Cluster Management System
• Debian-Beowulf
• Stone SouperComputer