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MultiPc many pcs to make 1 mega pc


nikotrial

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hi im new to this forum so hi to everyone and i love the hak5 show been watching it since they started..

well two days ago i had an idea and been searching everywhere with no result.. i thought to my self HECK i have 4 AMD XP computers thrown away in my garage and some other pcs and what if i could combine all the pcs and make one SUPER computer..connecting them through firewire or any fast comunication port is this possible? can i make computers share its proccesors(including grafic proccesors memmory ect..) or maybe have one full pc just as a mega graphics accelerator for games.. and share all hardware with each other sort of like a quad core computer... it would be a very large but powerfull pc.. i think they do this kind of thing for servers and large lab simulators...

if this already exist cn someone point it out for me becouse i havent found anything or dont know how it could be called

if it doesnt well here is a nice project for anyone interested.. im shure going to investigate a bit more on this

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It doesn't work quite how you suggest, though, it won't let you play your games with 16 graphics cards or 64 processors cores or whatever, it's used for tasks which can easily be broken up into chunks and sent out to other machines to be worked on.

I'll give an example: Imagine for a moment that you have a lot of 3D images to render to make a movie, rendering them all on one PC would take forever, so you can send instructions for each frame (each individual image) to 100 computers and have them each do 100th of the work. Now, once they're done, you can send them all back to another machine to be assembled (piecing together multiple frames is infinitely less work than actually making them). Now you have a video in a much, much shorter time than usual.

It gets harder when things have to be exactly timed as in a game, in this case it doesn't matter because as long as you send the frames back numbered then it doesn't matter if one computer finishes rendering its frame before another, the assembling computer knows where to put it, and the final product is as you expect.

Now, not only do you have different computers with different workrates rendering more or less complex frames, you also have network latency, so it's quite tricky to get the frames back in the right order at the right time unless you render ahead and assemble them before they have to be shown. This is a problem with games, because you need the screen to react quickly to the button presses and a buffer zone where the frames get assembled could be unreliable if a computer takes longer than the buffer to render its frames, causing lag.

I'm not an expert on this by any means, feel free to correct me, but that's how I understand it.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I can't help but correct you on this, but firewire is nowhere near being considered a high speed bus, topping at around 900 Mbits. Its slower than PCI, which is still nowhere fast enough to share system resources

Incorrect.

PCI - 133 MB/s

Firewire - 50-400 MB/s

Firewire is considered a high speed communications connection, due to the use of isochronous real-time data transfer.

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In the forensic world we call it distributed processing. I use it for indexing large amounts of data across 465 computers here at work. We also use it to crack passwords.

My personal idea was to use Amazon's EC2 to do this. I have seen some people use the Ec2 to crack passwords but I'm running into online transfer speeds and security issues for indexing sensitive information.

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