Grid computing software

[[527]phil]

I've been looking for grid computing software for a friend of mine because he wants to link 2 g4 mac computers together through the network card and use the combined processing power to make video editing tasks go a little bit faster. I found a few programs to do this (i used wikipedia) but I'm wondering if anyone else has done this before. if you have, what programs did you use?

[Kyle Fenton]

Look no further, If you have tiger or panther it is built in

Xgrid

[[527]phil]

Thanks for the help, but he doesn't have either one of those, and I'm not just looking for it for mac, i want to see if i can use it on my windows machines (imagine playing Americas army of Battlefield 2 with triple the processing power!! *drools*)

[sciguy125]

Step 1. Tell him to throw away his Mac and get a PC. (A whole Mac is almost as evil as the Windows OS)
2. Format your hard drive and your friend's.
3. Install Linux on both machines.
4. Learn to use and love the penguin.
5. Read the the following howtos, particularly the first one.
http://howto.x-tend.be/openMosix-HOWTO/
http://www.ram.org/computing/linux/linux_cluster.html
6. Enjoy your new Linux cluster that automagically detects new nodes on the network.

[Matt Leese]

Well, technically you aren't talking about grid computing. You're actually just referring to cluster computing (grid computing implies geographically distributed systems as opposed to just several systems sitting next to each other).

Now, beyond definitions, you may get some faster video processing using a cluster. Or you may not. When dealing with clusters, the key ratio you look at it computation to communication. If there's too much communication compared to the computation, then you'll actually slow down by using multiple computers.

In actuality, it's rather hard to get a speed up by using clusters. The communication required provides a huge hit on your performance maximization. This is the main reason that we haven't seen many commercial level clusters. It's usually restricted to things that are termed "hard problems" (N-body gravitation, cracking encryption, engineering simulations, etc.).

The vast majority of clustering setups these days no longer do implicit clustering. There are some software packages that do things in that manner but explicit clustering is more preferred now. What this means is that software has to be aware of clustering to take advantage of it instead of it happening automatically. The reason for this is the communication problem described above: the software needs to know if things are going to other machines so that the communciation doesn't swamp things.

That said, I would highly doubt you'd ever get video games to work in a cluster situation. For one, most are single threaded and don't have their work partitioned such that it could even take advantages of multiple processors, let alone multiple computers. There's simply too much communication required compared to the amount of processing.

I'm doing my thesis in this area so I have a bit of knowledge.

Matt

[[527]phil]

Thanks for the information, but I'm looking for Grid computing software, the system you just explained is parallel computing. As of now i can do mathematical formulas and code lists, But what i really want to do is use both computers for video editing. Right now it takes about an hour (with dual processors) to compile all the special effects and stuff, I'm just trying to make it go faster.

[sciguy125]

Maybe I don't understand your question, but from what I understand of how all this works, you do want a cluster. If I understand you correctly, you have 2 computers and you want to distribute a time consuming task between them. If your software supports multiple processors, then it's probably multithreaded, so cluster computing should work. Depending on the exact setup of the cluster, each node is treated as a processor. Essentially, you end up with a giant multiprocessor computer.

Edit: From what I understand, "grids" and "clusters" are functionally the same, but physically different.

[Matt Leese]

Originally Posted by [527]phil

Thanks for the information, but I'm looking for Grid computing software, the system you just explained is parallel computing. As of now i can do mathematical formulas and code lists, But what i really want to do is use both computers for video editing. Right now it takes about an hour (with dual processors) to compile all the special effects and stuff, I'm just trying to make it go faster.

Grid computing is a type of parallel computing. It basically is just a bunch of geographically separate computers that operate in parallel. You really are looking for a cluster even if you don't know it.

I'd look into your video editing software and see if it supports clustering. For it to really work, the software itself really should support the clustering.

Matt