Boot a CD and Make Your X-Box Join the Cluster

jaromil writes "Last week at the Linux Expo UK in London the dyne:bolic distribution was shown to boot on a XBOX console automatically joining a cluster of other PCs on the fly, there is also an article on ZDNet UK covering the story." The article also discusses some of the issues with getting unsigned code to run on the X-Box.

xbox too slow for the cost

[Carbon Unit 549]

As a builder of clusters, I can tell you that we are always looking for more bang for the buck. The xbox is cpu is at least 5 times slower than a Pentium 4 3 GHz cpu. Thus, it needs to be at least five times cheaper (including extra network and power comsumption overhead). A shuttle box with 1 GB Ram and GHz cpu goes for about $750. So at best, the xbox is barely breaking even at $150 per node. When you add chipping costs, network switches, power consumption, floor space and parallel efficiency, the xbox loses.

The playstation efforts, are to program the vector units, not just use the general cpu. Even with that it is not worth it now, but it is hoped that the experience gained with ps2 might translate to a quicker porting to ps3.

Now with added...

[Salsaman]

I am working with Jaromil on the dyne:bolic CD. The latest bootable CD also contains the LiVES video editing system [xs4all.nl]. With this CD it will be possible to grab frames from a camera, edit and splice the clips, VJ with them, then encode them to any format and burn them on to CD ROM.

Comparions...

[Realistic_Dragon]

VT cluster, $5.2M.

1100*2*2Gig=4.4 million PMU (Pointless measuring units)
1100*4G=4.4TB ram
1100*160G=176TB disk

Xbox cluster, $5.2M

52000*733=38.1 million PMU
52000*64M=3.3TB ram
52000*10G=520TB disk

Looks like the XBox wins to me, assuming you would figure out a way of jamming an infiniband network card in there, but then Google manages just fine with 100mbit*.

Of course you would get a big scream out of Redmond either way - buying Apple or buying the XBox, and it might be a tad difficult to get them to take you seriously when you ring up to order 52,000 XBoxes...

*100mbit to the rack switches.

Re:perfect timing

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

You're completely correct in your assessment of the situation. The only point I want to add that if this were the X-Box 2, then it would be in Microsoft's best interests to not interfere with this type of development, much. Certainly they need to keep people from pirating games but if people are buying X-Boxes and putting Linux on them, Microsoft isn't getting game sales BUT in the early days of any console, the sales numbers of the console are very important. Perceived market success by the consumer, drives further market success. If Microsoft sold 2 million X-Box 2's within the first two months of release and a quarter of those were solely for Linux - Microsoft is still in a decent spot because even without the game sales, they've got firm market share.

Of course, you could argue that the number of people who are doing this type of project isn't significant enough to play a role, as I've outlined. That may be true BUT once you introduce the idea of clustering, you can quickly get a big effect if people are buying multiple boxes. Just my two cents.