PCA Forums

i overheard some guys yesterday at work saying that when you have newtwork you can share resources but also your processors.

how do you make all your processors act as one?

anyone know how do this or do you need program. whichever it needs can any pop me link or your 2 cents

thx i appreciated

.....total BS. You're being hosed. Networking allows file sharing but that's as far as it goes.


(additionally)
.....well OK, printer and internet connection sharing too on conventional home networked PCs.
4 networked PCs here so far

when they said "share your processors" they probably ment share your computers, which often times people refer to computers as CPU's. Which confuse me right there.... I don't know if you've experienced this, but I have several times and I always have to correct them cause I hate when people point at the box and say "CPU" or point at the monitor and say "computer." It's just the wrong terminology

distributed computing?

discussing while i was reloading os on their computers.

LOL!
Yep.. I see people pointing at the box and calling it the "hard drive". Or peeps saying they "downloaded" the game into there computer when it was simpily a cd install and had nothing to do with the internet..

overheard some guys yesterday at work saying that when you have newtwork you can share resources but also your processors.

True, if you built a beowulf cluster all boxes would do the work.

http://www.beowulf.org/

That sounds interesting but that link's dead (inop). Might you have more info or another url? I'm curious.

Actually you can, just not the way your thinking about it, it's not like joining 3 1Ghz computers together to get a 3Ghz Monster, more about sharing resources.

You can share CPU resources but it's not for home use the most commonly used version of this is Citrix Load Balancing where users are distributed across your different Citrix Servers as the load increases so you maximise your resources. Have a look at NT Server Clustering also.

Darkheart

If you do a search on google for beowulf cluster you should find some more info.

its the same thing that seti does. distribute the info to be processed by many machines over a network. there are many different levels and setups. but the basic idea is the same.

Actually...

If you hack your TCP/IP stack, you can put bogus CRC's into the packets you send out. Then, when the recieving computer calculates the CRC's to check for data integrity, the other computer's resources are being forced to calculate whatever you put in the bogus CRC. It is called parasitic computing. The ony way to stop it is to disconnect from the internet (or an TCP/IP based network, that is). It is kind of a way to force a TCP/IP network to become a processor for you.

and there are also development platforms that allow various levels of distributed computing and client/server technology....sun microsystems has "Forte" which can be both distributed and load balancing if the software is written to take full advantage of it. this is different than seti, which isn't real-time distributed computing...seti just breaks the work up among many computers, but they don't all work on something at the same time, if you know what i mean.

.02

Poop that sounds interesting but is it really worth it? I mean the amount of processing power your gonna be able to leach is pretty pathetic even if you have a monster connection. Let's say your using a LAN to perpetrate this, that means you could send and recieve an absolute maximum of 100Mbps. Divide that down and you looking at 12.5 Mbytes of data a sec, which an old 486 could probably pump without a problem.

Doesn't sound worthwhile to me.

Darkheart