Please help! running two computers as one computer

Thread Starter

gvfc2

Joined Sep 14, 2010
7
I'm wondering if this is possible. I know there are motherboards that can have multi processors. But my question is how can I, if at all possible, have 2 motherboards with processors, 2 video cards, 2 sound card and 2 psu's as one I know it might be near impossible as one mother board would want to take over and stuff. How would I go about doing this?
 

beenthere

Joined Apr 20, 2004
15,819
Think of arranging for two side by side computers to get input from one keyboard and mouse. Both would do the same things with the same applications running. What would be the point?
 

Thread Starter

gvfc2

Joined Sep 14, 2010
7
oh yea i forgot the point. the point that i have in my mind is pretty much having 2 computers running as one. if its of the same type and has the same hardware in it and everything have the hooked up as one and pretty much double the performance. this is just educational. im not going to try it unless i get a good answer on if it is possible or not.

thank you to those who will help me in furthering my education.
 

studiot

Joined Nov 9, 2007
4,998
Yes it's quite possible.

There was a Scientific American article about university research departments doing just this with lots of old pcs running in parallel.

Of course the downside is that you have to have the control software. Windows is not in the picture.

Another way would be to have one pc running say a bunch of printers (or even just one) or a bunch of hard drives or other equipment, as a server or slave pc.
Server 'farms' run like this.
 

mjhilger

Joined Feb 28, 2011
118
While this concept is possible, it would not be very practical. And actually windows, posix or even unix/linux could all take advantage of the setup. Most OS's these days kick off processes called threads. The threads are small programs that preform a task and set a mutex or some other flag to indicate when their task is complete and the overseeing task grabs the result. This is how a motherboard with multi processors or even a single processor with multi cores works on problems. However, sharing the data becomes the bottleneck. If the task is something like number crunching like SETI@home where a set of data is crunched for literally minutes at a time, then data sharing is no problem. But most programs need to share data immediately or the delay will nullify any gain which might be achieved by the parallel processing.

So, it is highly dependent on the type of work to be preformed. Data sharing would be through the file system like NAS with fibre or gigabit connection. This is the setup of blade servers. Again very specific division of labor and not much use for desktop normal apps.
 

Thread Starter

gvfc2

Joined Sep 14, 2010
7
well since it seems hard. i will not be trying this anytime soon. maybe when i make some friends and get a well paying job i may make my one server one day. until then i will keep furthering my education
 
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