Parallel Computing

[Aditya_Pro]

Hey, everyone. I am trying to figure out how to connect two high end gaming rigs in parallel to make an even greater gaming rig. Any ideas? All help appreciated!

[McHox]

wat

[Dreaper]

I asked this before and the simple answer was its not worth it 

[Sauron]

6 minutes ago, Aditya_Pro said:

Hey, everyone. I am trying to figure out how to connect two high end gaming rigs in parallel to make an even greater gaming rig. Any ideas? All help appreciated!

You can't.

[SoundiBoy]

6 minutes ago, Aditya_Pro said:

Hey, everyone. I am trying to figure out how to connect two high end gaming rigs in parallel to make an even greater gaming rig. Any ideas? All help appreciated!

thats really possible 

[Radium_Angel]

Parallel computing requires custom software. It's the realm of specialized tasks (think folding@home) and not for gaming.

Unless you want to write your own game to take advantage of the extra hardware.

...good luck with that

[Dreaper]

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/807763-is-it-possible-to-sli-two-computers/

[ihatemufflers88]

yea, thats basically like trying to have SLI or dual CPU sockets over a network. Assuming you had a degree in say software engineering you could hypothetically figure it out...... but, the much much easier thing to do would be to upgrade your computer.

[Dreaper]

14 minutes ago, Aditya_Pro said:

Hey, everyone. I am trying to figure out how to connect two high end gaming rigs in parallel to make an even greater gaming rig. Any ideas? All help appreciated!

In turn sell one of the PC's and put the money to upgrade the other one

[Aditya_Pro]

7 minutes ago, SoundiBoy said:

thats really possible 

what's with the pessimism? nothing's impossible!

the impossible just takes longer to solve.

[SoundiBoy]

1 minute ago, Aditya_Pro said:

what's with the pessimism? nothing's impossible!

the impossible just takes longer to solve.

let me rephrase that. the amount of effort that you would have to put into it and the gains you would receive from it are not worth the time at all

[Aditya_Pro]

hmmm, that bad huh?

well thanks for the heads up but if the time and budget allows, i will still try it out!

[Sauron]

2 hours ago, ihatemufflers88 said:

yea, thats basically like trying to have SLI or dual CPU sockets over a network. Assuming you had a degree in say software engineering you could hypothetically figure it out...... but, the much much easier thing to do would be to upgrade your computer.

As a software engineering student (hopefully with a degree in a few months), no, you can't figure it out by yourself. You can definitely make a cluster, but you won't be able to use it as if it was a single regular computer. Modern hardware is exceptionally complex and it takes multiple teams of engineers with full access to the specifications to even get a single graphics card working well on a single computer and even more work to ensure stuff like SLI works as intended. One person, by themselves, cannot reprogram all of this from scratch to run across a network (not to mention the performance would be abysmal, since the network would be a massive bottleneck to things that require multiple gigabytes per second transfer speeds to work) and do it in a way that allows the operating system to treat it as a single entity (or even just boot, since I suspect there would be some inherent hardware limitations that prevent something like this in the first place).

[AncientNerd]

2 hours ago, Aditya_Pro said:

hmmm, that bad huh?

well thanks for the heads up but if the time and budget allows, i will still try it out!

Your problem is going to be that the network latency swamps everything. I have worked with "real" networked parallel computing and the goal it to have the fastest d*amn connection you possibly can between the nodes - back when I was doing this in the early 2000s we had 10GB fiber running between the nodes on specialized cards and a custom OS to balance the load. It still took custom programs to take advantage of the extra processing power, we had a distributed control system for controlling factory floor operations or Airport system operations that ran on multiple servers with a separate dedicated SQL server for data storage. Basically the reason that things have moved to multi-cores on one CPU die is to remove the latency of multi-processing operation - that's what a mult-core CPU is a parallel processor that hides the details from you so you don't have to deal with it at the programming level.

 

Believe me dealing with multi-processing at a hardware level is a whole order of magnitude worse than dealing with threading issues in a modern OS, you think thread coordination is hard when the latency is in ms or ns think of it being in micro-seconds or slower...

 

Good luck with your quest - there was some open source software running around a few years ago to do the kind of thing you are looking at (make two windows machines look like one) but I don't remember what it was called or if anyone every actually finished it.