Linux Distro turns PCs into Night-time Clusters

renai42 writes "An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix that aims to utilise the unused nightly processing power of corporate desktops. Dubbed CHAOS, the distro is able to remotely boot a computer and run it on Linux without affecting the local hard disk. CHAOS is designed to provide dumb node power to a cluster run by existing full-featured clustering distributions such as Quantian and ClusterKnoppix."

Useful?

[Daxx_61]

I don't know whether it's just me and my uninformed nature, but it occurs to me that switching off these computers would be saving a hell of a lot of money. Rather than using them for something else - which I notice TFA is not clear on, something about a demonstration - why not just power down?

From the Pure Hacking website - Internal on-site penetration testing gives the business the assurance it needs to conduct safely on the internet and with business partners.
It would make a lot more sense if this was only intended for use in demonstrations and testing though, as I can imagine very few companies would feel a need to use this sort of distro on a nightly basis, but for one off activities it may be useful.

Imagine a beo... oh, wait.

Do I lose the use of my CD drive?

[Dancin_Santa]

If it needs to have a Knoppix image installed every night, does that mean I need to leave the Knoppix CD in the drive before I head home? Sounds like the plan would work except for all the lazy people in the office leaving their Mark Knopfler CDs in the drive instead of Linux.

DDOS here we come

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope it will be secure enough.
If somebody runs a patched on version on his local machine it can take over the whole cluster.

Re:Useful?

[gl4ss]

there are already corporations out there that turn part of their desktops into a cluster by night.

they have a need for computation power that they can't satisfy and this gives them that at no extra investment besides electricity.

if you power them down then they're doing nothing, your investment just sitting on there. by using them to calculate stuff for the engineering department they're doing something usefull and the return on investment on them gets better.

Re:Seriously??

[sstrick]

No, but I can see companies that need to crunch large datasets installing this to do their own processing at night.

Re:Seriously??

[Ersatz Chickenweed]

Seems to me that what TFA is suggesting is that organizations can use this to gain part-time Beowulf capabilities on machines that could be running Windoze or whatever during normal office hours -- they wouldn't just be giving the processing time away to some random project over the Internet (although that could easily be done too), but using it for in-house projects where an outside connection probably wouldn't even be needed in most cases.

How Old is This?

[soniCron88]

"An Australian security firm is about to launch a clustered Linux distribution based on openMosix..."

You're kidding me, right? CHAOS has been out for some 2 years (at least). Unless I'm misunderstanding, or another Australian organization is doing this...:

CHAOS Distro [mq.edu.au]

But what do I know.

Re:Seriously??

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. From a major medical institution's perspective the parent's post is right on target -- when you start pondering genetic screening for a large number of patients you have to exploit a lot of horsepower.

Re:Hello? McFly?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really.

This is just a repackaged "ClusterKnoppix". If you're uncomfortable with it (justly), just grab Quantian. Though designed for scientists and number-crunchers, I've gotten a lot of general use out of it. Besides, if you're doing cluster computing it's almost certainly going to have some number-crunching component to it, and it's worth some overhead to have analysis tools on the client just in case.

It's from a pretty clean academic background and if you can't trust that, get ready to either audit the code yourself or cough up some $$$.