Setting up distributed computing?

[yhelothar]

So I have this old ass pentium 4 computer that has this expensive $4000 software on it that only has the licensing for that one computer. It runs waaay slower than it needs to be and would be so awesome if I can get it to recruit CPU resources from other computers over a network or something.

Is it possible to set up without doing some intricate computer programming?

 

[Kirby]

http://forums.anandtech.com/forumdisplay.php?f=15?

 

[eLiu]

Only if you run it upside down.

 

[Ken g6]

If that software is only licensed for that machine, I imagine it would be illegal to distribute the processing over multiple machines, even if it could be done. The best plausibly-legal idea I can come up with would be to virtualize the entire disk image on a machine with a faster CPU.

The second best idea I can come up with is to let us know what that software does, and we can suggest free alternatives (that might even be distributable).

 

[yhelothar]

How do I virtualize the entire disk image? My current idea is to clone the hard drive onto a similar but faster system and hopefully it would boot and load the new drivers.

The software is a mouse behavior analyzing software called topscanlite
http://www.cleversysinc.com/products/software/topscanlite/

 

[Ken g6]

I was thinking, "what does analyzing animals have to do with where I put my pointer on the screen"...then I got it. 🙂

There's no way to distribute proprietary software like this across multiple machines. Sorry. 🙁

Probably, virtualizing the disk is equivalent to migrating the OS to faster hardware. How it works probably depends on your version of Windows. This then becomes an OSes question. 🙄

 

[Mr. Pedantic]

If you could virtualize the disk, then why couldn't you just migrate the whole disk onto a faster machine?