connecting two pentium motherboards together

[Raheem]

Hi, i have a bit of an unusual request, i was recently sorting out my old "junk" and i came across a couple of pentium motherboards, and i wondered if it would be possible to connect the two together to act as one computer?

I have heard of people connecting multiple pcs together, but i am unable to find any sites on this

I have come up with a couple of ideas, if anyone has anything that may help with these, or any other ideas, i would love to hear them. My ideas are as follows:

1. Connect the two m'boards together with nic's, this was my first idea, is there a version of linux that will allow one of the boards to act as a "dumb" pc, just using its cpu and ide connectors?

2. use a direct cable connection, basicly the same as above, but using a cable connecting the two parralel ports

3. Does anybody know what would happen if i put one end of an ide cable in one board, and the other in another board? i havnt tried this yet, but i might one day!!

4. Should i just forget this whole thing?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[bogdanfirst]

from my point of view the best way is trough NICs....the best speed and all that.
now about connecting the IDE cable. i think smoke is about to come out...
i don't recomend it, because it will be like connecting the inputs of the boards together and the outputs too.
the paralel in not a good idea, you will have to get a cross connect cable. preety hard to find one. and plus, there is too small bandwidth.
another possibility is to use a serial link or a USB link, but i think that you cann't use the last one since you say the boards are old.
but in all the cases you will use them as 2 computers........

 

[Raheem]

the purpose is just not connecting them together

the purpose i want to get by connecting the boards together to get enhanced performance from these old parts using parallel computing. i heard somewhere that this could be done. using them as 2 diffferent pcs using a cross cable or DCC is not the aim

 

[sanjeevan_a]

i think what you are talking about is clustering. it is possible with linux, search for Beowulf on google, and you should get some information on clustering linux pcs.

hope this helps