Once upon a time, connecting multiple game consoles together seemed like a great idea. Multimonitored arcade machines like Sega’s Ferrari F355 Challenge and multiscreened PlayStation Link console titles inspired hopes of at-home gaming with linked consoles.

Now, even though bring-your-own-PC LAN parties have become popular, multiconsole gaming hasn’t gone anywhere. Today, virtually the only people buying two of the same console are Game Boy Color fetishists and PlayStation 2 owners with defective optical drives.

But there is another group: computer science students. Following in the footsteps of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s (UIUC) PlayStation 2 Computational Cluster project last year, in which 70 PS2 consoles were connected to form a true supercomputer, a group of comp sci techies in Ohio has created ClusterX, “the world’s largest Xbox cluster.”

Like the PS2 cluster, the free Linux operating system is at the core of ClusterX’s project, which presently features 12 linked Xboxes en route toward a goal of 35 total systems. The donation of 10 used Xboxes by one of ClusterX’s team members helped elevate the project over what was previously the world’s largest Xbox cluster, which utilized four units.

What’s the motive? The National Science Foundation gave UIUC grant money for the PS2 project, but Team ClusterX’s college wouldn’t fund research into parallel processing. Having heard about Xboxes running Linux, the team decided to use its own funds to “show [UIUC] that they spent WAY too much money for what they produced.” Armed with used Xboxes purchased for $75 apiece, they’re proving their point. Each Xbox has twice the processing power and RAM of a PS2, so around $5,000 today can accomplish what $50,000 in Sony hardware accomplished in 2003.

What can you do with a cluster of consoles running Linux? Sadly, the answer doesn’t involve Project Gotham or Halo 2. Most super-computing clusters are used for anything other than gaming applications—code breaking, genius-level math problems, and Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) are popular applications, and that’s why most people building computer clusters are students.

Team ClusterX’s ambitions are similarly academic. Member Robert Miller says that they hope to use ClusterX as an educational tool and to donate processing power from the cluster to local schools. As the project progresses, they’ll test dif-ferent parallel computing applications and perhaps develop a small-scale rendering farm for 3D graphic movies. You can check out the team’s current status at www.clusterx.org.

Build Your Own Xbox Cluster— for Cheap!

THE HARDWARE:

Multiple Xboxes—Used ones will do ($75-$100 each)

Multiport workgroup switch—To connect the Xboxes together (under $100)

USB to XB cables—To let the Xboxes use keyboards ($7-$10)

THE SOFTWARE:

Linux OS—ClusterX recommends Xebian 1.0.2 (free)

Cluster software—OpenMosix unifies your cluster (free)

Replacement Xbox BIOS—Open source Cromwell is legal (free)

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Xbox Nation.