Creation of HPS-cluster in budgetary conditions. How to do it?

Question

linux

Guys, the question is this, they recently organized a circle on information security. We have reached the stage that we need a virtual laboratory. Due to the fact that we are students, there is not much money. Under bustling collected:
- 4 machines with core 2 duo;
- 11 GB of RAM.
We came to the conclusion that we need to build an HPC cluster and deploy virtual machines of our test site on it.
Questioning such as kvm will work on this?
How will resources be distributed?
Is it possible to assign more memory to a virtual machine than in fact on one physical machine?

Answer 1

KVM on this will work with a creak.
You should not allocate more memory for a virtual machine than the real machine has.
Do not think that by combining 4 wrecked machines in a bunch, you will get the total productivity of all four - that's not how it works.
The maximum that you can achieve with such a cluster is a live migration of virtual machines from place to place.

Answer 2

On such processors, you can run a pair of virtual machines. BUT!
You can go the other way and make a small cluster based on torque, corosync and lxc. Well, experiment in parallel computing on mpi, make distributed storage on ceph. Yes, you can do a lot of things, at least for experiments. I recommend immediately installing a pair of ethernet adapters. Yes, even with kvm you can play around by passing adapters through sr-iov (only adapters should support this).