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Does anyone know how a computer cluster can be used for everyday applications, like for example video games?
I would like to build a computer cluster that can run applications over the cluster that were not specifically designed for computer clusters and still see the performance increase. One use would be for video games, but I would also like to utilize the increased computing power for running a large network of virtualized machines.
If you have a program written for a single core, running it on a four-core processor won’t help you (except that one core can be devoted to that program). For example, I have Visual Studio compiling on multiple cores on this machine, but linking is done on one core (and is annoyingly slow). In order to get use out of multiple cores, I have to either run something that can use multiple cores or run several separate programs.
Clusters are like that, only more so. All communication between the machines is explicit and must be programmed in. There are things you can do with a cluster (see Google’s map-reduce algorithm), but they do require special programming and work.
Typical clusters are used either to specialize machines (one might be a database server and one a web server, for example), or to run large numbers of programs simultaneously.