Is it possible to "SLI" two computers?

[Dreaper]

Wanting to know if its possible to SLI two computers and maybe off load certain processes to the other one or have them split the game for a boost to performance maybe idk

[Zando_]

I don't think so. They do that in supercomputers, but it's not for gaming. 

[Zando_]

The best option is to use the best one for gaming, and send me the other one. ?

[Dreaper]

3 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

The best option is to use the best one for gaming, and send me the other one. ?

If you would pay for it sure

[Guest]

Pay only for shipping?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Not for that purpose, no. There are technologies like cluster networks which distribute work among different systems (basically, that's what a super computer is). They're not practical for user-based tasks like gaming, but for things like rendering, encoding and such where you can just give it a workload and let it go, they can be very powerful.

[MrKickkiller]

4 minutes ago, Dreaper said:

Wanting to know if its possible to SLI two computers and maybe off load certain processes to the other one or have them split the game for a boost to performance maybe idk

Nope. 'Splitting a game' is DEFINITELY not as easy as the English language makes it sound. It is true that you could split processes on computing nodes, but even then you would be having terrible performance. The interconnects between cpu, chipset, memory etc are in the order of Gigabytes/second. Current day networking is 100 gigabits/second (in ideal situations & with expensive as fuck enterprise gear). So no  Best would be to get a dual socket motherboard, and fill it up with cpu's and cores

[Dreaper]

1 minute ago, Dutch-stoner said:

Pay only for shipping?

I mean shipping and more 

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, Dreaper said:

If you would pay for it sure

For real though, just keep it as a second PC for friends/significant other/imaginary friends of you don't have a life, or give it to someone to help them get started in the glorious PCMR. 

[Guest]

5 cents for your time?

[KenjiUmino]

4 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

The best option is to use the best one for gaming, and send me the other one. ?

that seems to be the best solution - looking at the OPs profile picture, i assume he is a twitch streamer ... so he could use one for gaming and the other one for streaming.

 

other possibilities are running a dedicated server for a game on one machine while playing as a client on the other ... running a world in a sandbox game with a lot of player buildings and stuff can be very taxing on cpu and ram. splitting the load of running the world and rendering what the player does on it can help

[Dreaper]

1 minute ago, KenjiUmino said:

that seems to be the best solution - looking at the OPs profile picture, i assume he is a twitch streamer ... so he could use one for gaming and the other one for streaming.

 

other possibilities are running a dedicated server for a game on one machine while playing as a client on the other ... running a world in a sandbox game with a lot of player buildings and stuff can be very taxing on cpu and ram. splitting the load of running the world and rendering what the player does on it can help

How hard is that to do?

[KenjiUmino]

7 minutes ago, Dreaper said:

How hard is that to do?

streaming is easy to do .. just install your favorite streaming application on one of the PCs, connect a capture card to it and run the video output from the other pc through the capture card. 

 

the difficulty for running a dedicated game server can vary from ticking some boxes and clicking "start server" to manually editing config files and typing commands in a text console.

[KenjiUmino]

2 minutes ago, KenjiUmino said:

damn ... quoted myself instead of editing.... 

 

[BuckGup]

Yeah it's called a cluster computer. You have one main head and then a much of nodes. It requires specialized tasks though as most programs aren't meant to be run on many computers 

[Dreaper]

11 minutes ago, BuckGup said:

Yeah it's called a cluster computer. You have one main head and then a much of nodes. It requires specialized tasks though as most programs aren't meant to be run on many computers 

Would it help with performance?

[done12many2]

17 minutes ago, Dreaper said:

Would it help with performance?

 

It would not help with anything listed in your OP.  It would help with very task specific workloads only.  

[SpaceGhostC2C]

11 minutes ago, Dreaper said:

Would it help with performance?

As @Oshino Shinobu said, it helps with the performance of the tasks it's meant for.

 

There are things that can be done simultaneously (or "in parallel), and things that need to be done sequentially. For anything that can be done in parallel, you want as many cores as you can in the CPU, and when you hit the limit you want as many CPUs as you can in the same motherboard, and when you hit the limit you want as many computers as possible, provided the gains from parallelization still outweigh the communication costs by then. A gaming example of something that benefits almost without bound from parallelization is graphics, hence why GPUs have so many cores, and why multiple GPU configs exist. At the other extreme, any recursive task can only be done sequentially, as you need the results from one step before you can calculate the second step. You can't help that by adding cores/CPUs/computers, so you want the fastest possible core to eat through each step quickly. A gaming example would be a game engine "AI", which needs to update its decisions as the game moves, it can't just decide the next 20 actions by using 20 cores, as they would become irrelevant after the player's moves. Another example is generating the frames that GPUs eventually draw: while drawing is extremely parallel, generating the sequence of frames is extremely sequential, hence while single core performance of CPUs matters so much for FPS numbers.