How to make 3 computers act as one

[Hammy12Edgar]

I am trying to host a website, but don't have a powerful enough rig to do it. What I do have, however, is three rigs (exactly the same) that could do exactly whats needed for my site. The problem is, I don't know how on earth they can be linked together to work as one system. I know massive webservers have thousands of linked systems, so my question is, can you do the same with 3?

System specs:

3X:

*(dell optiplex 775 By the way)
* Intel Core 2 Duo CPU E6550 2.33GHz
* 2Gb DDR2 Memory
* 80GB SATA Hard drive
* DVD optical drive
* 8 USB ports
* 1 Ethernet Port
* 1 Serial port
* 1333mhz FSB
* 1 Parallel port

 

[BreadWhistle]

^ Who are you to call him an idiot? Ever heard of a SERVER?

 

[yobobjm]

Or a computer cluster? I honestly don't know how feasible it is however.

 

[poweruser_24]

You probably want a web server farm rather than a distributed computing environment.

Server farms, have independant machines, however there is a load balancer in front of the machines which will route traffic based on a set of rules.

The simplest set of rules are round robbin or connection based.

A really cheap load balancer (well not really, but traffic distribution) is NLB, a network service in Windows Server. Most proper load balancers are hardware based, and cost several thousand.


If you really do want a distrubuted computing environment because your website is big and clunky, then you would probably find it cheaper to purchase a more powerful server.

 

[elbert]

Its pretty simple as long as all 3 are on the same network and your ok with linux.

http://pareto.uab.es/mcreel/ParallelKnoppix/

 

[Hammy12Edgar]

Best answer selected by Hammy12Edgar.

 

[Hammy12Edgar]

thanks for the helpful responses, Ill have to look into Linux too...