Using multiple computers as one

[MrFixit1436]

I had a random thought one day and was wondering if it was possible to have 5 or 6 desktop PCs and link them together to act as one pretty powerful PC that runs Windows 10. Is this even possible? If so, how?

[kalnick]

1 minute ago, MrFixit1436 said:

I had a random thought one day and was wondering if it was possible to have 5 or 6 desktop PCs and link them together to act as one pretty powerful PC that runs Windows 10. Is this even possible? If so, how?

Pretty sure its not possible to do this with today's tech

 

[MrFixit1436]

There might be a way to do it with a cluster of some sort, but im not sure how.

[kalnick]

2 minutes ago, MrFixit1436 said:

There might be a way to do it with a cluster of some sort, but im not sure how.

just not sure how you would have all the systems feed into one central something

YOu would need some sort of software/hardware that would act as a bridge of some sort or as the "primary PC" that you then install WIndows 10 as some sort of VM maybe

 

[Navbryce]

11 minutes ago, MrFixit1436 said:

There might be a way to do it with a cluster of some sort, but im not sure how.

There really isn't a way of doing this (running Windows 10 powered by multiple machines). If it was possible, there would be a TON (I assume) of networking and driver issues.

 

You can create a computing cluster with those computers and use: Apache Storm (primarily Java), Apache Spark (Python), or Hadoop (Java)... However, to use these computing clusters, you need to write code "in parallel" to run on them. Each of these "parallel compute engines" has its own unique API that you would need to learn.

 

 

[emosun]

there isn't a way to do this

you essentially can't combine an on the fly workload over several machines.

Given some proprietary software you can allocate tasks across several machines that are predetermined like rendering or number crunching tasks.

[Jarsky]

The short answer is No.

 

You can cluster applications, and run failover clusters between Windows systems, but you cannot distribute the OS across multiple PC's

[Dlog]

Is your actual goal increased throughput in a specific application, ala video encoding, 3d rendering (there are different ways to do this) or is it increased performance in general.

 

If your looking to just push two computers together and make a super fast machine, your out of luck. Even if this were something available the network would slow things down to unreasonable levels for anything needed live (ie gaming).

[Blebekblebek]

Windows 10? No

 

The feature only available on Server edition, it's been known and even microsoft them-self publish an article How-To-Do it Yourself.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2539.diy-supercomputing-how-to-build-a-small-windows-hpc-cluster.aspx

 

By any means, this is to build a super computer, now if you think you want to cluster everything (including GPU) for gaming purpose, first thing you need to do is develop a game that could utilize a clustered GPU, even SLI/Crossfire support is quite rare in most games.

 

Also if you think this will be useful for daily usage such as browsing, gaming, and doing multimedia stuff, it's not.