Chaining Motherboards

[radtechtips]

Is there any way to "chain" two motherboards together so as to be able to utilize both cpus. i am asking becuase i have two HP motherboards i would like to make a casual game server with. I have 6 RAM modules but only 4 slots on each. It would be great if i could chain them. Has anyone tried this.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Yes -- it's called a local area network.

Otherwise, no, unless someone has invented something weird I've never heard of.

 

[radtechtips]

i tried that but it didnt really work with ubuntu. Do you know what os it works best with?

 

[Charles Kozierok]

I am not a Linux guy but I'm 100% sure there's a way to network two PCs together using Ubuntu. You may be able to use a crossover cable, but usually the best way is two ports on a router that's also used for wireless or connection to an ISP box.

 

[radtechtips]

I tried a crossover cable but that may have been my wiring. i have an old router i could try it with.

 

[radtechtips]

Would SATA work to transfer files? im guessing not

 

[john3850]

What you are talking about is usually called "clustering". In order to do it, the Operating System on both machines needs to be able to handle clustering and sharing loads across more than one set of hardware. The problem basically stops right there, you are looking at a high end version of Windows Server or some flavor of Linux/UNIX.

 

[dawp]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/building-linux-based-high-performance-compute-cluster

found that after a quick google search

 

[snoylekim]

OS X Server might be able to do this; Apple's Compressor App allows one to create clusters with more than 1 mac ( 2 Mac Minis, for example) to utilize both processors for transcoding video - it's pretty slick. The application would also need to be able to fully leverage multiple processors as well as multiple threads per processor .

 

[dave_the_nerd]

This is (used to be?) called a Beowulf cluster. A coupl elinux distros are specifically designed for setting these up.

The software you're running has to be specially written to take advantage. Apple's spec is called XGrid, and there's an SDK for it too. But besides the render farm crowd and science people writing custom code for specific sims or projects, I haven't heard of it getting much use.

 

[john3850]

http://www.linuxjournal.com/magazine/building-linux-based-high-performance-compute-cluster

found that after a quick google search

That link has some good info to read so thanks for the link.