Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Is it possible to connect 3 pc's together to act as one pc? So when Im doing graphical design in photoshop (can be slow at times) it would use the cpu and resources from the other pc's to help? Im using Windows XP on all 3 machines.

The machines are:
2.13GHz Celeron D, 768MB RAM, 40GB HD
2.0GHz AMD Athlon Mobile, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD
500MHz Penium III, 392MB RAM, 30GB, 80GB, 200GB HD's

All are networked through a linksys router.


Thanks in advance.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

You can cluster servers, but as XP is a client OS and not a server, I doubt you'd be able to do it without changing your OS. Even if you can, I'm not aware of any way of configuring Photoshop to use clusters, but I'm far from knowledgable in PS, so someone more in-the-know may care to differ.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Im sure there will be a program out there to allow virtual cpus etc. Ive tried looking myself but ive found no information on how to do it. All I got was information on what it is.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Doubt it would be effective as the network speed would provide a (relative) bottleneck.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Well I have 100Mbps, soon to be 1Gbps...

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Its possible in Linux but i doubt it would be in Windows to be honest.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Anything is possible if someone designs the software for it. One of my friends was going to do it but he wouldnt know where to start. He said it would be useful for him as well because of the amount of video editing and encoding he does.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Way, way less than the data will transfer over the buses inside the PC especially between CPU, RAM, L1/L2 caches etc, wouldn't be worth the effort imho.

Re: Using 3 pc's on a network as 1 pc
 

Well anyhow, it would be nice to try it out.