[aclug-L] Re: My Boewulf... sorta

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jonathan Hall <jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Well, I have, in a manner of speaking, a Boewulf cluster in my bedroom now. 
> I don't know if it technically qualifies as a Boewulf, but I think it does.

Not Beowulf, since you're not using the Beowulf software, but it is a
(rudimentary) distributed processing system.

> I can probably outperform John's 600Mhz Alpha with this setup, when encoding
> 4-5 MP3s at once (when encoding a single MP3, John still obviously wins, b/c
> he can contribute the entire 600Mhz to the encoding, whereas I only get to
> utilize my full 1136Mhz when encoding 5 MP3s at once :-)  John still may win
> even when doing 4-5 MP3s at once, b/c he doesn't have to transfer his MP3s
> over 10mbit ethernet to each of his nodes.  :-)

The Alpha generally can encode at about 4x realtime.  However, this is 
an estimate, because I have never actually used it to encode when
there was not significant other stuff going on (gcc, gimp, etc).  It
may be plus or minus 1x that figure.  Furthermore, this is always with 
the 'absolute best quality output' selected, which generally causes
encoding to be slower.

> Well, I guess that's all I have to say about that.  It's kind of a fun
> little project. :-)

Yes, very interesting, people here may be interested in your scripts.

Incidentally, I think you mentioned a dual machine.  You may get
improved performance if you can run two encoders on that machine
simultaneously.

> P.S. I hope you don't mind me using your computer as a comparison, John. 

No problem at all :-)

> BTW, what kind of encode-time/play-time ratio do you get when encoding MP3s
> on your Alpha @ 128kbps?  (I'm using 8hz-mp3... which encoder do you use?)
> :-)

I believe I have lately been using LAME, but I did use BladeEnc
before that.  I really don't do a significant amount of encoding, so
I'd have you double check.

-- 
John Goerzen   Linux, Unix consulting & programming   jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade)       www.debian.org |
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