Distributed Computing

Distributed computing is a great thing. It is the process of sharing computation over several processors. This is the concept behind the linux farm, which is a group of Linux computers which share their computing power, in essence you have one very powerful server. This is great because not only can you have a server capable of computing faster than existing servers, but as a home user you can take several old computers and use them together to get a high speed server, for whatever you might need a high speed server for.


So today was clean out the back room at work day. This meant free computers to anyone who wanted one. It also meant, since I was doing the cleaning, I got first pick on all the reject computers. So I picked up a nice, very small 600 Mhz PIII that is going to replace my existing 450 Mhz firewall/router. It is even smaller than the current one I am using, and much faster as well. It should work out nicely. I also got two 500 Mhz PIIIs that I am going to use for who knows what. But when I come up with an idea, it will be great. I will probably just use them to fool around with different linux based servers at my house, but I might go all out and use them with the 450 Mhz I have freed up from the router in a little distributed computing setup. It would be a neat thing to play around with. Maybe I'll set it up to try and calculate the next digit of Pi or something. Not that it will be fast enough to compete with the current distributed network that is calculating digits of Pi, but I am sure there is some other obscure digit out there that no one really cares about that I could try and calculate. Let me know if you come up with one.