Is It Possible to Connect Multiple CPUs To Act As One?

[Masman8675]

Hey folks, after doing some Googling as to whether or not it's possible, I'm having a bit of difficulty finding out whether or not it would be possible.  I'm just wondering (in theory) if it would work to combine multiple computers' power all under one hood.  Combined RAM, processing power, etc.

 

I work at a Walmart and heard they will be replacing their PC's later this year.  Hopefully I can get a hold of them either directly, or from a local e-waste bin I have access to.  Not sure if they're all the same, but at least 2 of them are Dell OptiPlex 1030s (Small Form Factor).

 

Thanks!

 

 

[Lurick]

Not in the way you're thinking about no. With some very expensive equipment and fiber interconnects and custom software, you can do something similar and have everything act as a distributed unit for special tasks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Is there a task you want to speed up? You can setup clustering, but you need programs support and it won;t appear and work as one system.

[Princess Luna]

Only specific CPUs on specific motherboards like these

 

Now connect multiple stand alones PCs like one? nope.

[Mira Yurizaki]

9 minutes ago, Masman8675 said:

I'm just wondering (in theory) if it would work to combine multiple computers' power all under one hood.  Combined RAM, processing power, etc.

Combining processing power is doable through clustered computing as mentioned. But not combining resources like RAM and such because of the differences in speed that computers communicate with each other. If you're doing this cheaply, for example, the bottleneck will be the network speed operating at 1Gbps. For all intents and purposes, if a computer wants data from another's RAM, its effective speed "RAM speed" if you will is 1 Gbps, which is a far cry from the ~17 GB/sec (or ~136 Gbps) that DDR4-2166 operates at.

 

EDIT: Even in the computer itself if we had a multi-processor system, depending on how fast the CPUs talk with each other or how many hops the data has to make, this can be an issue when one CPU wants data from another CPU's memory pool.

Edited April 24, 2019 by Mira Yurizaki

[Masman8675]

13 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Is there a task you want to speed up? You can setup clustering, but you need programs support and it won;t appear and work as one system.

Well, I would be wanting it for rendering with Blender.  Sorry, should have said that.  Other than that, I wouldn't use anything else on them.

[Enderman]

No, unless you get a multi-CPU motherboard which only supports certain CPUs.

[mineblaster]

something like this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster

[unijab]

1 hour ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Combining processing power is doable through clustered computing as mentioned. But not combining resources like RAM and such because of the differences in speed that computers communicate with each other.

 

 

There are some IBM power systems that actually connect CPU/memory/IO between physical chassis... like the p880 and p980

[mineblaster]

23 minutes ago, unijab said:

 

 

There are some IBM power systems that actually connect CPU/memory/IO between physical chassis... like the p880 and p980

using infiniband?

[Electronics Wizardy]

4 hours ago, Masman8675 said:

Well, I would be wanting it for rendering with Blender.  Sorry, should have said that.  Other than that, I wouldn't use anything else on them.

You can easily cluster blender, just use the built in network render manager and make a little render farm.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, mineblaster said:

using infiniband?

Some intel systems used qpi for linking multiple systems to act as one.

[unijab]

3 hours ago, mineblaster said:

using infiniband?

Knowing ibm.. it's proprietary.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 hours ago, unijab said:

There are some IBM power systems that actually connect CPU/memory/IO between physical chassis... like the p880 and p980

Can one system completely take over the resources of the other?

[unijab]

10 minutes ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Can one system completely take over the resources of the other?

it acts as one system, not as two.

[Mira Yurizaki]

2 minutes ago, unijab said:

it acts as one system, not as two.

Ah, so it makes it a NUMA node.

[Masman8675]

5 hours ago, mineblaster said:

something like this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster

Ooh, ya, like that!  Maybe if I could get that up and running...

2 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You can easily cluster blender, just use the built in network render manager and make a little render farm.

Would you be able to point me to some articles/tutorials for that please?

 

Thanks everybody for all your input!

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

3 hours ago, Masman8675 said:

Ooh, ya, like that!  Maybe if I could get that up and running...

Would you be able to point me to some articles/tutorials for that please?

 

Thanks everybody for all your input!

 

 

Here is a pretty through guide https://cgcookie.com/tutorial/setting-up-a-renderfarm/

 

But basically, enable the add on, then set to network render, and go.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

Ah, so it makes it a NUMA node.

It had lots of problems with Cache though. There was a lot of head scratching in that area. One of the mainframes the company I work for made also had similar issues. Later on a shared cache was implemented.

[Mikensan]

I couldn't find OptiPlex 1030, but did find 3010. Assuming it's the 3010 which can handle "up to an i5" this would mike a pretty decent render farm, just keep in mind the power to processing power ratios.. Would it makie sense to sell all the parts / computers and in turn buy a modern i7 system which could possibly do the work of xx number of computers?

[Masman8675]

14 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Here is a pretty through guide https://cgcookie.com/tutorial/setting-up-a-renderfarm/

 

But basically, enable the add on, then set to network render, and go.

Sweet, thanks!  I shall look into it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

5

6 hours ago, Mikensan said:

I couldn't find OptiPlex 1030, but did find 3010. Assuming it's the 3010 which can handle "up to an i5" this would mike a pretty decent render farm, just keep in mind the power to processing power ratios.. Would it makie sense to sell all the parts / computers and in turn buy a modern i7 system which could possibly do the work of xx number of computers?

Ya, sorry, that's what it was.  I was running on memory only, I didn't have it written down or photographed anywhere.   That is a valid point regarding selling then upgrading.  Might wind up doing that, thanks for the idea!

[Masman8675]

Not sure why that quote error is above...

[leadeater]

On 4/25/2019 at 1:07 PM, Mira Yurizaki said:

Can one system completely take over the resources of the other?

This is known as MPP in the HPC industry, of the top 500 super computers 11.6% are of this type. They are very special systems and as mentioned are the IBM Blue Gene and Cray XC etc systems and have specialized interconnects that have custom communication protocols and many many connections per node to get the required bandwidth. These are 'one system' though you can create hardware resource pools to split up the resources to run multiple tasks etc which are not unlike creating VMs or containers but instead of being isolated to a single node you are able to span all nodes. Clustering on the other hand is just workload assigning to many nodes but a task can never exceed the capability of a single node even though the total combined resources would technically be capable.