Can multiple towers work together?

D

dstebbins

Member
Could I take two towers, each of them maxed out, and connect them to one monitor/keyboard/mouse/HDD combination, and have double the stopping power on any one application? They would all work, together, to give me the ultimate in performance.

I'm not talking about multitasking. I'm talking about one process. Think of it like a tug-o-war. Both towers are contributing, and, just like with two people pulling on that rope at the same time, the result is twice as good.

Is such a thing even possible? I think it could be theoretically possible. The gadget we would need is a double-male PCI-E adapter. I'll install one side of this adapter into one motherboard's PCI-E slot, and plug the other side of the adapter into a second motherboard's PCI-E slot. These motherboards will now work together. If they are two copies of the exact same motherboard, then my maximum configuration has just doubled.

It would be tripled if I could do that twice. I could stack it, indefinitely, so long as I have the resources.

Does such a thing exist yet?
 
What you're talking about is called a beowulf cluster, and is impractical for most common situations. I'm pretty sure you'd have to have a multi-threaded program for it to work.

A big downside is that if one machine is slower than the rest, it'll drag them down since they have to wait on it.

Doing it with some sort of PCI-e card would significantly help the latency caused by the network interface, but I can't think of anything like that. I think most people use gigabit ethernet cards when they make clusters.
 
Drenlin said:
What you're talking about is called a beowulf cluster, and is impractical for most common situations. I'm pretty sure you'd have to have a multi-threaded program for it to work.

A big downside is that if one machine is slower than the rest, it'll drag them down since they have to wait on it.
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Ok, apparently, I'm mistaken.

First of all, how is it impractical? I can get unlimited specs, by stacking them, this way.

Second, how does one motherboard slow the other down? If I have one motherboard with 24GB of RAM, and another with 12GB of RAM, shouldn't I have 36GB of RAM, total?

THAT'S what I want to do!

Doing it with some sort of PCI-e card would significantly help the latency caused by the network interface, but I can't think of anything like that. I think most people use gigabit ethernet cards when they make clusters.
Click to expand...
Let me put it this way:

You know those double-sided USB cables, the ones that you can plug into two different towers, mostly to transfer data?

Well, show me a double-sided PCI-e adapter! One that can connect two female PCI-e slots together!
 
I don't believe the technology for what you're talking about exists. However, for something this specialized, it'd be much more practical to use a card and some sort of specialized cable, rather than running a cable directly between the motherboards.

Traditional beowulf clusters are impractical because there's a lot of latency between the systems. They're good at number crunching on highly multi-threaded applicaitons...not much else.

When I said a slower system would drag the others down, I was referring to the processor speed, in relation to a beowulf cluster.
 
basically he is saying that if you put one 2 GHZ and one 2.5 GHZ together, then teh 2.5 will have to wait on the 2.0 (assuming that they are the same brand and model I.E. 2 core i3/5/7 or C2D)
 
Agreed. as stated above. If you made them both with the exact same specs you could get them to run in unison but I would imagine the cable data transfer would be a huge bottleneck. you might as well just stack motherboards in one computer. (But still impractical), if they are different the computer would run at the speed of the slower parts, not because the faster computer is processing data at the slower computers data rate but because the faster computer will have to wait on the slower computer to process the same ammount of data.

-Edit- I dont know if you can find them but a Dual Processor motherboard would probably work better. I know they exist in servers, I have a couple old P2 Dual Processor motherboards.
 
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