A lot of times we have to run a command that requires a lot of processing power and is extremely slow on your local computer. I have faced this issue in the past and at times wished there was a way to push these commands to a remote machine with a more powerful CPU to run the command. Now, thanks to the efforts of Alexander Overvoorde (Overv), Jakub Wilk and Xiretza this is now possible. They have created a tool called Outrun which lets you execute a local command using the processing power of another Linux machine without having to install the command on the remote machine.
Sample Execution of ffmpeg on a remote server
The software does have a few limitations, but on the whole it is very cool:
- We need to have root access on the remote server (or sudo access) as the system needs to run chroot on the remote server
- Both client and remote server need to be on the same architecture, so you can’t set up a session from an x86 machine to an ARM machine. Which is unfortunate because the first usecase I had for this tool was to run software from the RaspberryPI on my server as and when it needed more processing power.
- File system performance remains a bottleneck
Check it out if you need to run commands with more CPU cycles than what is available on the local machine.
Thanks to Hacker News for the initial link.
– Suramya