In article , mentat wrote: :I am trying to get my old mac, a G4, to use my G5 and PC to share it's :cpu load because it is older and needs help. I need the G4 because it :is the cornerstone of my recording studio so I cant just upgrade to :the G5. I read server farms, clusters, whatever, can do this... so my :questions is does anybody know a good load distributing application or :method (preferably cheap and or free) like platform computing's LSF :(load sharing facility) to help me setup a simple 3 computer server :farm. I am running Debian on PC and Darwin (OSX) on mac.
OSX is a form of BSD, so probably LSF would compile fairly cleanly for it. But your Debian system isn't going to be binary compatable with your G4/G4, which could lead to problems, depending on exactly how you set things up.
Your reference to not being able to upgrade your G4 leads me to suspect that you are running a bunch of commercial applications on it. Those commercial applications are probably not built with load sharing in mind, in which case it wouldn't matter what you were running on the other systems because the G4 wouldn't know to hand off any work.
:Would gigabit :ethernet be better for this?
Frankly... No. Gigabit ethernet would help if you had tightly coupled processes on each of the systems that were exchanging a lot of data. I am not aware of any program that can take a random commercial binary and automatically re-write it to do load distribution. There just isn't much point in using a load distributing system without software that is aware of the load distributing system.
I suppose it is possible in theory to substitute alternate versions of dynamic shared libraries that farm off some of the work to other machines; whether that would help or not would depend greatly on how the binaries do their work.
One mechanism that one of our people has been mentioning to me is OpenMosix (or at least that's how I assume it is spelt.)