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."

Good thing!

[sachins]

Now I hope that SETI and those other protein folding projects can really get a boost. Who knows? A company which is carrying out its own research may actually be helping its competitor giving it the processing power in the nighttime! And what about i/p stuff, if someone makes a new finding will it be credited to the computer or to the whole cluster ? I think these have to be sorted out first. These issues have not come up partly because SETI and others have not found out anything significant yet. But who knows. that day might just be tomorrow!

Precursor to the Grid?

[kyle90]

I remember hearing about how in the future, we would be able to plug in to the internet and not only access information but also spare processing power. It would be really handy; most of the time you are only using a fraction of the power of your computer (for example, my usage is hovering at around 8%, and I have a movie playing as well as several other applications running), but when you need more processing power, you could get it on demand. Of course, the lag would make it too slow for video games and such, but for some computationally-intensive stuff (video editing, ray-tracing, etc.) it would be perfect.

I had this sort of idea

[ajs318]

I was thinking about "cheaper than free" software -- a Linux distro that turned your broadband-equipped computer into a cluster node while idle -- a couple of years ago. All that computing power going to waste ..... But I couldn't find a way to build a business model around it -- it was just too hit-and-miss for any task I could think of. What data is there that can be batch-processed in a completely non-time-critical fashion, and is so non-security-critical that it can potentially be shown to thousands of strangers?

You could encrypt everything {and that would go some way to prevent tampering with the returned results}; but then, if you're going to process encrypted input and return encrypted results, that will eat a lot of your processing power. It's a bit like putting a V8 engine through a three-speed automatic transmission ..... in the end, it won't really do anything an old transverse four and man-tran can't, apart from drink fuel and leave you wondering why you bothered.

There is a possibility of "inter-cycling" in certain, limited settings {using corporate desktop machines which typically have only a few gigs of apps and data for RAID-like backups of servers springs immediately to mind}. But outside of these circumstances, switching off when not in use and recycling when done with are the best ways of avoiding waste. There is often plenty of life in a used machine if it doesn't have to run a bloated graphical desktop environment and numerous accessories {wanted and otherwise}. And at least used PCs are something you can store up till you have enough of them to do the task you want to do ..... remote CPU time and bandwidth are only available for fleeting moments.

Re:Good thing!

[De Lemming]

Projects like Folding@Home [stanford.edu] already have generated usable results [stanford.edu]. Their FAQ [stanford.edu] answers the question "Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?":

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.

Re:Useful?

[Jesus_666]

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.

It's not a company, but at my university (the University of Bremen, FYI) we have a computer lab full of Dual P4 Fedora boxen, some WinNT boxen and a few antique Sun Blade 100s. At least the Linux boxen are clustered at night and used to bruteforce the student's passwords. If they manage to discover your password your account is locked and you have to go to the admin and have a little talk with him concerning secure passwords.

I can imagine that a lot of companies might be using similar means of making sure that the suits don't use immensely creative passwords like "love", "sex" or "god".

Hello? McFly?

[Spackler]

Nice. A hacking company wants me to load a tiny 6 megabyte linux client into my secure network that then becomes a dumb node in my cluster, "without disturbing (or even touching) the contents of the local hard disk". A company that says they use the power to crack passwords.

Yeah, sign me up with the full knowledge of how many company network policies I would be violating, and the fact that I would not trust them as far as I could throw a datagram.

Hmmm, it quacks like a duck. I would swear they taught us this in both "Social Engineering" and Advertising. Give the "mark" a little benifit, and then take over his world.