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supercomputer

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by laddie

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supercomputer, built using old computers. how do u hook then u to each other. if u use the nic, how do u stop the conflick, if not the nic how else would u connect the to get to run. i seen it done once before at a site. but that was years ago.runniing 98 but looking at redhat.if thought the nic, do u use a cross over cable???thanks

13 replies

by pb_valiant

not quite sure what ur asking - but if ur asking do you need a crossover cable to connect 2 computers directly to each other without a hub or router - yes u do.

please be a little more specific - what exactly are u trying to do.

by laddie

about three or four yrs ago, read an artical about a guy using his old 486s as a supercomputer. have all that just need to figure out how to commect them together to make them work as one machine.get all the cpu's working together.how do you connect the motherboards together, though the nic with a crossover cable or though the controller with a ribbon cable??hope i an making it clearer. thanks

by rindi1

Normally you'd use network cards and a hub or switch to get the PCs to communicate with each other (no crossover cable, as with such a cable u can only connect one nic directly to another, and 2 PCs don't have anything to do with your "Supercomputer"). To get such a system working you will have to get info on "Clusters and Linux". Do a search on google.

Bear in mind that most linux distributions today don't directly support 486 PCs anymore, and you would need a lot of these to get close to todays pentium class PCs. Also, you won't find a lot of software which will support clustering.

by bobho

You're probably talking about something like the Beowulf project.

Check out the Beowulf.org site for historical info and directions on building your own network computer.

Cheers.

RW

by stress junkie

As in the previous answer your account of having seen this done reminds me of the Beowulf clusters. Making use of old computers to make a bigger computer was exactly the goal of that project. Originally developed at NASA by employees there in their spare time the project originally just involved adding some internode communication and locking capabilities.

Look at www.sourceforge.net for a variety of cluster projects that will fit your goals. They divide this sort of thing between clusters and distributed computing. Look at both categories. Be sure to only choose mature projects to use for experimenting.

by stress junkie

The Beowulf cluster is connected by way of NICs. The most effective interconnect would have to be a cheap hub, maybe 5 ports? You can get very inexpensive hubs using 10/100 Ethernet ports. Crossover cables between NICs would limit the number of nodes too severely. A 5 port hub would give you enough scalability to perform an effective test of the idea and would be easy to implement.

The usefulness of this kind of cluster is limited to using software that can work as many independent threads/processes. Database servers would work well because they are written to use several threads to service database requests. Office applications would not work well because they are single threaded.

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