Hooking mutiple computers.....

[joshme]

What I would like to do is hook several PC's up using maybe firewire like to hook several Mac's up together. I mean make them a sort-of RAID, but thats a stretch, I guess. Non-the-less, I have several computers and I just want to make them "one." Any help on how and what exactly that is called? Danke.

 

[office politics]

KVM switch

one keyboard/video/mouse for multiple machines

http://www.belkin.com/moreabout/kvm.html

 

[Ethereal_Dragon]

I am not familiar with the Mac OS, and haven't seen any info about networking with firewire....

But, I know that with Windows, you can map network drives to computers other than your own. I can only imagine that the Mac OS would have something similar. as far as RAID, I DOUBT it.

 

[joshd]

as far as i know, there is no way to make two or more computers work together as one. you can network them and share HDDs so another computer can access them, but you cant share ram, cpu time etc.

 

[jeremy]

there is some way to get it done see this project just as an example http://folding.stanford.edu/ , its called "distributed computing" and "grid computing" how exactly you set it up i have no idea have a look in google maybe youll get lucky

 

[macdude425]

But, I know that with Windows, you can map network drives to computers other than your own. I can only imagine that the Mac OS would have something similar. as far as RAID, I DOUBT it.

It does. You have the "Network" part of the Finder and all of the Sharing tools in the System Preferences.

I too think the RAID would be near impossible to pull off.

 

[joshme]

well, I know you can hook several Mac's together through firewire, NASA does it all the time to create a supercomputer to figure stuff out (I have three neighbors that work for NASA, there must be something in the water...) and so I know it can be done with Mac's, I'm just trying to see if it can also be done with PC's because I don't like Mac very much, Steve Jobs, *shutters* although they have a flippin crazy fast Video Card, bastiches...

 

[hilowe]

well, I know you can hook several Mac's together through firewire...

It sounds like you're talking about a "cluster".

I've never looked into it very close, but I was under the impression that you needed a special OS to do this. I thought the typical Windows and Mac OS's weren't capable of doing this.

 

[joshme]

I've never looked into it very close, but I was under the impression that you needed a special OS to do this. I thought the typical Windows and Mac OS's weren't capable of doing this.

I found out that a cluster is sort-of what I am looking for, and does make sense in the application of NASA. It will not, however, work for Windows, but it uses Linux and special programs written to be split between the two or mutiple processors. Apparently I can also use Windows Server 2000 Advance to cluster together. Another thing to use is a Beowulf network, which is just like clustering. I'm still researching into this more, but I could also utilize whats called a processor farm where one processor takes a program, breaks it up for other computers to complete a certain percentage of the program, and then it takes the output and uses that. I still have yet to figure that one out, but that sounds like my best bet before converting to Linux, so far (I have nothing wrong with Linux, just want to see if it can be done with Windows). We shall see.