2 PC's linked?

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grebgonebad

grebgonebad

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Hi everyone!

This is probably going to sound stupid to most of you, but please bear in mind that I have only posted this to gain knowledge, not get burned about something I know nothing about, wihch is why I'm posting the question...Thankyou!

If I have 2 identical PC's, both built at the same time, using the same hardware/software etc. can you link the PC's together in such a way that you have 1 pc, but it uses the processing performance of both? Much like a server i suppose.

If this is possible, how does one go about it? Would you be able to use the full funcionality of both sets of hardware, including GPU's, or is it limited for software reasons?

Thanks in advance for any VALID replies! :bounce:
 
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chugot9218

chugot9218

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Those components do not natively know how to communicate with eachother in that fashion, between two separate systems. Hardware solutions are kind of silly, because if you need hardware to combine them, you might as well just buy hardware that can run all the components together to begin with. In almost the same way, software to combine the systems add's some overhead, and may not be worth it unless you are combining many machines at once, enough to overcome/justify the overhead.
 
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grebgonebad

grebgonebad

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Thanks for your detailed reply!

Ok, so linking two PC's together is a no go. So why are servers different? They use large amounts of hardware that all communicates with each other, such as the new Titan supercomputer. Is it simply a case of purpose built hardware?
 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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I have used two computers connected on a network, both with their own monitor, and used a program called Synergy (http://synergy-foss.org/) to "link" the desktops together to utilize one keyboard and one mouse - giving the appearance of one desktop instead of two. The mouse moves seamlessly from one to the other.

The two computers are still separate, and don't combine resources, but I had the ability to do something processor intensive on one computer, while the other's utilization would be low, and I could surf the web.

I am not aware of any software that will accomplish resource pooling (two or more computers to create one "supercomputer") - they do have software that takes one "supercomputer" and you can create multiple virtual machines on the one computer.
 
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grebgonebad

grebgonebad

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This is an interesting option. So I assume that you could have 1 powerful PC for doing all the heavy lifting, and a smaller, less powerful PC for internet browsing, word processing etc?

This is a valid option that I shall look into. And thanks for providing the name of the software!
 
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ronintexas

ronintexas

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Synergy allows for multiple operating systems (Linux, MAC OS, Windows), and doesn't care what hardware is used on any machine. You can virtually go unlimited in the computers connected in the cluster, so in theory, if you had 10 computers, with 20 monitors, you could arrange it to one giant desktop across all the monitors, using one keyboard and mouse to go across all of them.
 
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