The AnandTech Linux XBOX PC Experiment

Final Thoughts

Turning the XBOX into a slow desktop or a limited Media Center had its advantages. The XBOX seems fast enough to do some everyday computing like email and web, although we wouldn't recommend using the bundled Xebian distribution over a local install. The XBMC software package looks like an excellent work in progress that we ended up spending more attention on than we originally anticipated. The ability to play back DiVX movies from a network fileserver or just bring up the weather instantly really made us wish MythTV had such degree of control over the network. Of course, XBMC does not utilize PVR functionality. Hopefully, some of the excellent work from XBMC ends up in projects like MythTV and Freevo for non-XBOX folks as well.

After several days of configuration and set up, we finally got our cluster up and running. Costs of the cluster were a little higher than we had originally anticipated; we bought a hard drive blaster, a switch and various cabling, duct tape and shelving. Other costs added another $150 to the price of eight XBOXes ($1200) and mod chips ($480). The total cost of the cluster as configured in the article came out to $1830 - the cost of two Opteron 250s and a very poor dual socket motherboard. Unfortunately, we might have expected too much of our XBOX cluster. The saying goes, "Many hands make light work." The addendum should read: "unless the hands are actually four-year-old stripped down processors made for Microsoft." Probably, had we tried this experiment in early 2002 instead of late 2004, we would have had more shocking results. Cracking keys on the distributed XBOXes showed a lot of promise fortunately, particularly if we can get the network to scale high enough. Other projects that require constant CPU operation like folding@home and seti@home would be the best use for such a cluster; just remember the $1400 electricty bill per year for a 16-node cluster.

The ability to add more memory to our XBOX would have significantly boosted performance in render and compile operations. Since encryption/hashing relying mainly on computing power alone, our XBOX might be out of luck there - granted our cluster performed the best under this test. VIA's EPIA platform has small hardware optimizations for many encryption algorithms, which we would probably see much better performance there in a different analysis. We saw in this analysis that while the XBOX does alright in some benchmarks, it's only advantages are price and footprint. Building an equivalent cluster on other ~$200 PCs (that can be upgrated none-the-less) would theoretically yield far better performance. Expect a low-cost DIY Linux cluster guide from us in the future.

As far as clustering goes, we can do some pretty similar things with VIA's EPIA platform as well, and that will probably be the focus of a different distributed Linux project. VIA's 1000MHz Nehemiah platforms run for about $150 without memory, case or hard drive, although you can still find some of the older 800MHz EPIAs for about $100. However, XBOX has the advantage of a readily available and extremely standardized setup. Finding a chassis combination for the EPIA platform that serves a render farm correctly might be a little harder for a VIA based approach, but we will leave that for a different article. We also would like to setup a similar cluster with PlayStation 2 consoles, but that may be another article as well.

Setting up a cluster has its advantages, provided you can utilize programs that will correctly take advantage of as must computing power as possible. Even though an XBOX cluster will scale very quickly for a relatively low price, lacking the ability to upgrade CPU and memory really drag our performance down. The amount of computing power that we demonstrated today on the eight-node cluster only resides in a 3' by 2' by 2' volume, which is excellent for an eight-node Linux cluster. The practicality of our cluster turned out to be fairly negligible; had we seen some really outstanding performance, we probably would have been able to justify the hours of work and configuration. Perhaps NetBSD or Linux will get an early jump on XBOX 2 so that we can try out our next attempt to run Linux on Microsoft hardware a little earlier in the game.

Special thanks to BMMods for providing us review samples for this article.