I have been contemplating turning my 4 oldest computers into a Rocks Cluster, basically just as an academic exercise to see if I could do it and get the experience. I ordered the DVD with all the so-called Rolls. I am ready to go.

I'm thinking this would be good for folding. I'm thinking (and that my be my whole problem!) that the cluster, with its 1 frontend and 3 clients would act as one 'supercomputer'. I could load the folding app on the frontend and it wouldn't care about the setup of the machine it was on, it would just think it was on one machine with with a lot of processing power. So, I go over to the folding forums and I'm told it won't work and it was suggested that I run 4 separate instances of the folding app, one on each of the computers.

Uh... then why am I building a cluster?

Apparently I don't understand the uses for a cluster or how it works exactly. So, any enlightenment about what I can do with the cluster after I build it will help me decide to go for it or not.



(Also,, I wasn't sure which forum would be a best fit for this, so I threw it in the Networking forum.)