Here is a random question that I have. If I have three computers connected via ethernet, Can I somehow use a program to enable me to use all three computers processing capabilities toward one task. Example: Computer One: Converting Home AVI to DVD Movie. * Procesor Runing at 100% a lot of extra memory very little hard disk activity Computer Two: Idle Computer Three: Idle Can I utilize computer 2 & 3 to help process the task at hand and if so how do I set it up and what software do I need? I know there are dual processors built into motherboards and server utilize similar abilities but can I do it with three free standing computers to "process" one task? I appreciate your help
To set it up as a system would prolly be more hassle than it's worth. There are distributed operating systems and programming languages to do this in corporarate/research environments. A simple approach might be to do the encoding on one machine and have the output file on a mapped network drive so it ends up on the machine that will do the DVD burning. If the files are large then you have to take into account the bottleneck of the network transfer. If you can capture to the machine that's doing the encoding then it might be worth doing. Just keep the PC with the burner, burning. I'd suggest cutting off clips and just experiment around distributing the tasks manually. Distributed processing can be a good idea if the components in the system are comparable. It's like in Linux you can have multiple swap partitions on different physical drives and you can set "round robin" parameters which disk will get the swap data. But it does no good if the alternate disk is like 10 times slower than the main disk. It's faster just to use one swap partition. So what makes sense depends on the particulars. How fast is each machine? How fast is the network. How will transfers be managed and the nature of the tasks etc..
