[Nottingham] Clustering (part-reply, part own experience)

[Jim Moore]

Right now, I'm using Clusterknoppix on my own cluster (I used Dyne:Bolic 
for a while since that had autoclustering), mainly for audio/video work. 
I don't know the mechanics of it, but I do know that the video side of 
it does get a /huge/ performance boost* with 6 Athlons and 3 P4's, 4 
P3's and a VIA Nehemiah (as the controller node) in the mix, not so much 
the audio (which seems to be a single-thread deal). The Nehemiah has two 
ethernet cards, one as the world-facing connection and the other through 
its own switch facing the cluster (up to 23 nodes in current 
configuration). I can access the Nehemiah from anywhere else on the LAN 
and through ssh or VNC set up jobs for the cluster.

*Never mind benchmarks, I go real-world here. Single-processor P4 DVD 
encoding on my 2.0 laptop with 1.5GB RAM runs about 1/6 realtime from a 
DV source. 4 frames a second. On the cluster, which has about 20GB of 
RAM between the nodes, the same encode ran at over 4x realtime.

Posted from Thunderbird on Wintendo 'cos my kMail stopped sending... 
anyone got any ideas on this? I'm using the exact same settings on both.