has Anyone Ever seen, /used/setup/ administered a beowulf cluster.

I have a buddy wants to set one up as a file server/ firewall /radius server for personal use. ( he plans on using a DSL connection to the world, then setting up a dialup so he can can access it outside the DSL area)

Is it safe to assume that any linux distro can handle these operations when spanned across 4 boxes????

http://www.beowulf.org/howto/howto.html

Why does he want to use a cluster for those services? It would be much easier and probably more efficient to just run them on seperate machines. Besides, to run an application on a cluster it has to be designed to use PVM(parallel virtual machine).

Originally, all he wanted to do was set up the cluster.....

When i asked why, he said to see if i can do it.

I told him it would be a waste of money unless he came up with a reason to use it...

So, he and another friend currently pay for 2 dialup accounts.

He figures that canceling the dialup and going DSL (at the friends place--- it's not available in his area) setting up a firewall to hide the radius and sharing DSL bandwidth, he can still play, learn and have a real reson to do it. ( the file server will probalby be used for his gaming stuff, I dont know)

make sense??

Makes absolutely no sense.
A beowulf cluster is not appropriate for this.

Linux Virtual Server is probably what you should be looking into.

Your friend may want a cluster -- although I must say that there really isn't much point -- but not a Beowulf cluster.

Beowulfs have a very particular architecture: They are designed for running coarse-grained multiprocessor applications where a single processor can act as "traffic director". This means running scientific or CG applications, but that's about it.

What is his goal out of using a cluster to do what a single machine could easily do? Since he's running off a DSL line performance isn't an issue; is he thinking in terms of reliability? Or is there really no reason at all?

He read about it somewhere i think, and thought it would be cool to have... Who knows, I guess he believes that he'll be able to have a "super computer" / server that runs on 486