Setting up a chess cluster

[bedouin]

I'm greatly impressed by the KiloNodes per second displayed by Deep Junior and would like to set up a 12 node cluster with free/open source software. I posted this on another site and a guy called Jeroen said Dr Hyatt and other experts could offer advice.

I looked at GPU (http://gpu.sourceforge.net/) who in turn suggested open mosix but the prospect of looking at the black screens of Linux does not thrill me (I hate golf but I would be prepared to play golf than touch Linux).

So in short is it only the Dr Hyatts who can run clusters or can laymen do so?

[CRoberson]

Maybe you don't understand what a cluser is and what it takes to
do the job.

A cluster is a group of seperate machines each containing one or more
processors. Many times the cluster may be heterogeneous in nature (OS, Memory, CPU ....).

To run a program on a cluster requires special programming. This
programming is different from the threading approach that most use
to get programs to run on multiple CPU's in one machine.

Thus, you will not be able to get any of the current commercial
chess programs to run on a cluster as if the cluster is one big
virtual machine.

[CRoberson]

On free open source software:

I am not aware of any of the free chess programs that have
"distributed computing" programmed into them.

Typically, (to reduce the programming effort) you need a
distributed computing environment running on each machine in
the cluster. The best such environments currently reside on
Unix OSes (AIX.HPUX,Linux, Solaris ....).

[jswaff]

I looked at GPU (http://gpu.sourceforge.net/) who in turn suggested open mosix but the prospect of looking at the black screens of Linux does not thrill me (I hate golf but I would be prepared to play golf than touch Linux).

Brother, I think you'd better break out your five iron.

--
James