Using several computers as one?

i dont have a high end build of a computer (sadly) but i have got several laptops, 3 nx7400's. they are not the best but i was wondering if i could get them to all work together to do single tasks, like rendering and gaming "low end ". if possible what do i need and if not then please just tell me straight.

 

if i can i will be looking at a six core 2.00ghz with 6gb ram bundle. if not true can someone please explain it further to me?

No and yes. Computers can be grouped into clusters, a simple definition is that a cluster is a group of machines working on or towards a common goal.

Whether this be web serving, data mining, high compute situations, etc etc. However what you may have noticed about my examples is that they are mainly server based tasks. Web serving is mainly a load balance cluster type, where load is distributed among several compute nodes that each can respond to requests. Its how sites like Google, Amazon, Youtube, Ebay etc. can connect with so mainy people at once.

For gaming, you can't do it. I'm sure if you really wanted to get nitty gritty and try, you could program a network based xfire/sli based solution so that multiple GPUs can render images in real time over a network. You could, However the latency would be way too high for it to be of real use. Unless you want to play at <1fps.

Rendering of videos and images is different. Many video editors can do this, Vegas used to be able to (except it was an absolute pig), but others like Adobe (after effects), Blender and there are others still can.

The issue with rendering over a cluster, as with more basic web serving on a cluster, is having fast enough disk access for all the machines to be accessing at once. Which ultimately could slow down the render than just doing it on a single machine.

The Blender Foundation has a nice overview of their cluster setup.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMJXiOF9MGM

Anyway, hope this gives you some ideas of where to go from here.

 

thank you, this actually helped me out a lot