Is it possible to connect several PCs together?

Question

I want to have like 5 computers connected to each other so that they would be sharing processor/ graphical/ ram specs together, and one out of 5 pc, which i would be using would use all the power from other 4. Is it possible?

Answer 1

No, a PC is a singular "workstation" and you need one per person. The only thing you can do to share a resource is possibly through a "diskless" work station. You can make a bare bones "cheapo" pc that can boot from a network and share network storage.



I've used them before, they suck and even the fastest ones are agonizingly slow.



The down side is, the server will be expensive to begin with and you will still need an OS license for each work station. You don't pay for the actual, physical disk, you pay for the privilege to use it.

Answer 2

Not simply, no. The theory of sharing computing power to perform a task is a fairly complex setup. You can create parallel processing, which processes lots of smaller tasks over lots of processors, but this isn't designed for home PCs.



For instance, companies that create computer graphics for films have places called Render Farms, that contain server racks full of processors and RAM. however, this is laid out in a hardware configuration designed for the purpose of sharing tasks, whereas home computers are designed to perform single tasks themselves.



There's no simple way, if any, to link directly to a PCs processing power from another PC, just to slave it. You could, with some computing knowledge, build a program that could distribute tasks between machines, but you will be limited by your networking speed, and the speed at which the main PC can distribute tasks to other machines. It is not a simple setup, and will require patience and a lot of background knowledge of how your PCs hardware works, along with proficiency in a programming language powerful enough to support such a task, so be warned.



I hope this helps.

Answer 3

You would ahve to connect them via ethernet and have a custom linux OS to make use of all the hardware.



BUT the problem is, ethernet caps out at 1Gbps (128MB/s) which is only alittle more then the speed of your average hard drive. SO really that would completely bottleneck everything, and probably lower the overall performance lol (unless you had ALOT of them) or military grade networking.