So, apparently there’s a lot of really angry people that read Digg on a daily basis, some with some justifiably angry comments, and others with some not as justifiably angry comments. So right now, I’m going to address the most common comments.

A dual core 2.66ghz doesn’t mean you have a 5.32ghz box:

Bravo, you’ve discovered that I was glossing over some deep parallel processing theory. Two machines or cores will not get through a single process at the combined speed of their processors, as you will only be using one of the processors at a time. However, if you are to break your tasks into multiple processes, the work can be done with each process being given its processor or core. This is the brilliance behind parallel processing. You are not doing any particular work faster, you are just doing a bunch of it at the same time. With a little simple algebra, you can see that work being done brings your box’s or cluster’s total productivity average to roughly the equivalent of the SUM OF ALL CORES.

Moving on…

T5212 machines are bad machines:

Now, I cannot personally say anything negative about these machines, though it is entirely possible that they are a large steaming pile of crap and I’ve gotten very lucky with mine (I have 5). Now it is not important that you use these types of machines in your cluster. It is far more important that you use the processors within and compatible hardware, but let me speak to the primary issue: Intel Core and Core2 processors do not work with openMosix 2.4 . That’s all there is to it. You’re also going to run into freaky problems with AMD 64 bit systems, so I’d recommend you stay away from those as well. The basic gist is that this software will run on any system with a Pentium D class processor or lower, and X-Windows (if you want it) requires about 64mb of ram to run properly. My suggestion of the T5212 was out of good experiences.

Now diggers, please stop being so angry!