RAM/CPU Sharing via network

[Mazo]

Anybody know if it is possible to share RAM/CPU across the network e.g. assign a network PC to a certain program on another PC thus sharing the cpu load across 2 PCs? Cheers

[MentaL]

[Sardaukar]

Hmm.. not in any godo way.. no.


Picture the throughput needed to do this.

A standard network cable is a base 10/100, up to speeds of 100 megs transfered throughput one way or the other, now the processing amount of the standard CPU wouldnt allow a very steady transfer through a NIC port due to the speed of it..

ANd on top of that, not sure if I can pull any program that would let you do that across my head.. there are some you can buy for professional reasons, but again.. I cant pull the names off the top of my head.

[NoPeace]

No... The bandwidth would be to low to even matter. It might even slow it down as the PC's would have to wait for the data to be transfered before continuing.

There are special connectors on server boards that lets you interconnect them but I don't remember the name of it and I doubt you'll go off and buy $10k worth of hardware to do it. =P

NoPeace - out

[Mazo]

CPUShare - The Low Cost Supercomputer

:/ And thats over a normal internet connection?

[theRAGE]

Uhhh... clusters anyone?

Check out Linux Virtual Server as its free/open source, it should fit your needs.
Linux Virtual Server - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Mazo]

WITHOUT Linux and WITHOUT parallel tasking :)

[username1]

No, because *nixes are the only operating systems advanced enough to do that -- and even then, special modifications are required.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_computing

[Shawnmb]

Windows 2003 based servers have clustering support, I'm sure this doesn't compare to Linux though.

[Mazo]

So, How come things like SETI@Home or Folding@Home can do those things? :)

[Shawnmb]

Those are distrobuted computing projects, in summary they feed each client a chunk of data, that client processes the data with no restrictions as to when the data has to be returned, and eventually returns it upon completion.
Clusters on the other hand are a completely different concept, think of it as if the machines were running in parallel to eachother. (I'm really lacking in the vocabulary department today from lack of sleep)