What can a Beowulf cluster help process?

Question

So, my school has hundreds of old computers and a few gigabit switches. Coordinating with the head of district for my school, I've been granted permission to make a Beowulf cluster, using one, two or three tutorials.

But, the compute possibilities aren't clearly defined, and I'm confused.

What I know:

• You can't run GPU dependent games across the cluster
• You can't run non multi-threaded applications across the cluster

What I don't know

1. How well programs such as y-cruncher scale
2. What can run across the nodes
3. If everyday computing is supplemented (such as opening random apps, password cracking, etc)
4. If programs such as virtualbox scale across the nodes

Answer 1

If you mean by a Beowolf cluster a MAAS cluster, you're on-topic at Ask Ubuntu.

1. There is a huge difference between multi-threaded and clustered computing. The y-cruncher algorithm is a multi-threaded algorithm and needs shared memory to be able to function so computing π using that algorithm is not easily done on a cluster.

2. Anything that can use clusterable algorithms. E.g. a bunch of Apache servers or MySQL Cluster will be "easily" scalable on a bunch of old hardware (for a certain definition of "easy").

3. If your "everyday computing" includes running a web farm: Yes!
   If your "everyday computing" is just using office productivity: Not really...

4. VirtualBox will not help you: you need the opposite: a cluster OS and a lot of fine-tuning to have the disparate hardware work well together as clusters are normally built using new hardware with identical performance specifications.

   It is easier to have identical/similar machines work together than a 33 MegaHertz 80386 with 1 MegaByte of RAM and a 2 GigaHertz dual-core Intel I3 with 2 GigaByte of RAM…