• The development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system, is prohibited using the contents and materials on this website.

dual computers PCs

Andrew911tt

Andrew911tt

Active Member
Joined
Feb 2, 2004
Messages
450
Location
San Diego
Car(s)
2008 MazdaSpeed3 GT
I was wondering if there was a way that I could connect two computers together so that I could combine there processing.

I heard that Macs do it easily but is there a way to do it with PCs
 
get Linux ;)

it doesnt work with Windows unless you install Windows Server 2000/2003 Advanced Server for 2 nodes or Datacenter for 4 nodes... and theyre failover clustered so they dont share CPU...

under Linux its easier: see http://www.mosix.org/
 
Most people don't really need it though. Esspecially because there isn't that much software thats built for the purpose.

Video encodeing comes to mind, thats a good application for it.
 
yeah, two PCs are better than one :mrgreen: Well, unless they're two really crappy ones....
 
well, if you combined the power of the 2 then you would have one less crappy computer, in theory anyway. Never tried it so can't say how well it would work.
 
EASY to do... Sell both computers buy one really fast one.

Or try and build a Beowulf cluster.
 
I forgot I ever posted here, haha.
 
Just curious, will Windows Vista make this easier to do now or is it still really hard to setup under Windows?
 
progs need to be written specifically for this task, it's generally called a "farm" (3D rendering progs --> "render farm") and it works in few cases. you can't just take 2x 2ghz comps to make 4ghz. in terms of gaming, photoshop, video playback, internet, etc, that idea would be useless. it's only proven to work in tasks that can be divided or "bucketed" like 3D rendering, video work (compositing, encoding, etc), heavy math computation, CFD, and so on.
 
^--- even that only works in some progs. windows will sometimes give one core to one prog and the other to the second, depends on how its all coded
 
AutoMX said:
progs need to be written specifically for this task
Click to expand...

not quite true. programs simply need to be written as multi-threaded applications. the OS (or third party manager) then shuffles the threads to other empty CPUs on the LAN.

related, applications also have to be multi-threaded to take advantage of multi-core CPUs or multiple CPU systems. its like having 10 people with 10 buckets vs. having a single person with a single bucket trying to move a tank of water.


the benefits usually only show themselves with small data chunks that take up lots of processor time - otherwise you spend too much time throwing the data across the LAN to make it effective.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top