Desired project - direct me to resources?

[systematek]

Hello!

I'm brand new to Pelican HPC and relatively new to Linux in general.  I did manage to successfully set up a Kerrighed cluster from Ubuntu and it's actually somewhat stable, to my shock and surprise.

However, I really like what I'm seeing with Pelican!  I especially like the interactive ability to add nodes.

So I'd like to describe a project I'm considering, but first, my reason:  I work with some non-profit organizations here in Denver, Colorado and they get lots of donated old computers.  One of them is trying to gather up the funds to buy a new server so they can run a server-based fundraising software.  It requires a Windows server environment, and they got a donated version of Windows Server 2008.

What I'm wondering if I could do is put together a dozen or so Pentium 4s in a cluster, install VirtualBox, then install Windows on that, to run as a production server.

Am I crazy to even think it is possible?

Is there a way to install Pelican HPC persistently on a hard drive?  Would a process like VirtualBox take advantage of the multiple CPUs/memory?

If anyone has any experience with this sort of thing, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks in advance and WOW what a project you are doing!

-Eric

[Michael Creel]

systematek wrote:

Hello!

I'm brand new to Pelican HPC and relatively new to Linux in general.  I did manage to successfully set up a Kerrighed cluster from Ubuntu and it's actually somewhat stable, to my shock and surprise.

However, I really like what I'm seeing with Pelican!  I especially like the interactive ability to add nodes.

Thanks.

systematek wrote:

So I'd like to describe a project I'm considering, but first, my reason:  I work with some non-profit organizations here in Denver, Colorado and they get lots of donated old computers.  One of them is trying to gather up the funds to buy a new server so they can run a server-based fundraising software.  It requires a Windows server environment, and they got a donated version of Windows Server 2008.

What I'm wondering if I could do is put together a dozen or so Pentium 4s in a cluster, install VirtualBox, then install Windows on that, to run as a production server.

Am I crazy to even think it is possible?

You could install VirtualBox on PelicanHPC compute nodes, I don't see any problem with doing that. Then you could create virtual machines to run Windows or anything else.

systematek wrote:

Is there a way to install Pelican HPC persistently on a hard drive?  Would a process like VirtualBox take advantage of the multiple CPUs/memory?

If anyone has any experience with this sort of thing, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks in advance and WOW what a project you are doing!

-Eric

If you install Virtualbox on PelicanHPC compute nodes, you'll have a number of separate Virtualbox installations, not one big one that shares resources like CPU and memory. So I don't think that this will work the way you want it to. This morning I ran into this link: http://lxer.com/module/newswire/ext_link.php?rid=121575 I haven't read it, but it sounds like it might be interesting to you.

For installable PelicanHPC, no it is not installable. There is a project underway to create an installable distro that works like PelicanHPC, but it is not ready for public consumption yet. I expect that they will announce sometime this summer.

Cheers, M.