Maybe I'm insane, bit I thought I'd ask anyway. would anyone happen to know of a dvd authoring program written so as to be able to take advantage of a Beowulf cluster? I have a bunch of old computers and switches, so I thought some has to have thought of this before, so maybe there was a binary floating around. Thanks in advance.
You won't find a ready built binary, but you will be able to build your own using the source. Every cluster is different, you will need to optimize your code for the number of nodes and streams, and also what your core os happens to be.. Mine runs on old IBM minix code because it is small, and seems pretty happy with BSD libraries. I started from the source code for transcode and dvdauthor which is working fairly well on a twin stream 40 node cluster. (not beowulf, just large parallel). Still tweaking it when I get the urge. Results are pretty variable and I don't attempt to do any actual decryption or the like with it, just a straight transcode usually.. dvdauthor wasn't keen on the mulitple nodes, it only likes 2 streams, after that it becomes buggy and stalls. In the source code you will find various references to streams, threads and nodes.. they should be self explanatory if you can get something like clusterix actually running on a mix of old hardware. You won't see much of a speed boost over a good dual core modern machine until you get up above 30 266mhz nodes. Network latency is a big problem, especially with timed operations like streamed video conversion. It can eat up to 60% of your work cycles just waiting for the slower nodes to output
