Can computer clusters be used for common day-to-day tasks?
Does anyone know how a computer cluster can be used for day to day applications like video games?
I would like to create a computer cluster that can run applications across the cluster that were not specifically designed for computer clusters and are still seeing performance gains. One use would be for video games, but I would also like to use the increased processing power to run a large network of virtualized machines.
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If you have a program written for one core, running it on a quad-core processor won't help you (except that one core might be dedicated 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 access multiple cores, I must either start something that can use multiple cores, or start multiple separate programs.
Clusters are like this, only more. All communication between machines is clear and must be programmed. There are things you can do with a cluster (see Google Map Reduction Algorithm), but they require special programming and work.
Typical clusters are used either for specialized machines (such as a database server or a web server) or to run a large number of programs at the same time.
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This won't help, especially in the case of video games. You must build around a cluster; the cluster is not running around you.
Either way, video games require up to 50ms response times in input and response, and network proliferation will simply ruin any performance gains you may see. On the other hand, video processing benefits from a cluster, since the task is inherently aimed at parallelization. It does not require user input and the output is measured only in terms of a batch process.
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You won't be able to easily run a video game on a cluster unless it's already designed to run on multiple computers. I have not heard of such a game. You might be in luck to create a virtual server farm, but I doubt it will be easy to get it to work perfectly. If you are interested, Amazon EC2 is one example. They offer virtual machines for "rent" by the hour. Behind the scenes, I assume they have a giant cluster that powers all of these VMs.
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Unfortunately, unless you have some pretty smart operating system / software in mind - just plugging programs together through a cluster and hoping for a performance boost is unlikely to work - especially for video games. To improve performance when running on a cluster, you need to program it, otherwise there are good changes, you will see performance degradation, not increase.
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