We conducted a survey of production clusters in 2004 and came across Beowulfs and Mosix based clusters. Each type has its own benefits but on an ASP model, we selected openMosix the best because of its unique features. Following were the things we had in mind for testing:

1. Cluster in an ISP environment [ squid proxy, dns and other services]
2. X-windows system load distribution
3. Basic load distribution

The results were really amazing and it proved that dedicated cluster farms built from common PC Hardware are a cost saving method for building a supercomputing platform for research and development based organizations.

Here are a few snapshots of Toaster cluster

 

Front left view of 10 node Toaster cluster

Rear view showing a 100mbps n-way switch on top
30 minutes power backup system. The power backup is distributed to nodes via extension sockets
Monitoring terminal and task execution terminal
Display of nodemap file
Amazingly the KDE applications are parallelepiped automatically
Process migration on 7 nodes
Process listing on web view
Cluster status while executing K-Office, Tux Racer and K-Stars simultaneously
.
We are now writing to donors for the establishment of a supercomputing lab environment in Quetta, Balochistan. If all goes according to plan then we will have a 40 node cluster ready in a few months. If you can donate PC or networking hardware then your help will be greatly appreciated.
Please contact info@openbox.cjb.net