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<blockquote data-quote="hokiethang" data-source="post: 15642"><p>that really wouldnt be clustering, thats more shared resources. If you connect 4 machines to the network you theoretically have 4 cd drives. In order to do anything greater than simply using drives of another machine, you really would have to get into a more expensive project. Supercomputers are not designed to do the things you may want to do with them (like play games or do photoshop). Supercomputers are all about getting data moved through a processor as fast as possible. Firewire/USB as far as I know can not be shared over a network, and if it were it probably would be slow (ethernet is 100mbit, firewire is 400mbit). trying to share ram over a network would be stupid as well because internal ram speeds are mostly in the range of 1 - 3 Gigabit. Its possible, with the right software to share ram, but you will have a very very SLOW computer (since the processors would have to wait for the network to deliver stuff to local ram). Supercomputers use their own ram at each node for their own calculations, and when they finish the data they are working on, they send the information back to the head node of the machine. The head node then organizes the data and dispatches new data to that machine for it to process.</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="hokiethang, post: 15642"] that really wouldnt be clustering, thats more shared resources. If you connect 4 machines to the network you theoretically have 4 cd drives. In order to do anything greater than simply using drives of another machine, you really would have to get into a more expensive project. Supercomputers are not designed to do the things you may want to do with them (like play games or do photoshop). Supercomputers are all about getting data moved through a processor as fast as possible. Firewire/USB as far as I know can not be shared over a network, and if it were it probably would be slow (ethernet is 100mbit, firewire is 400mbit). trying to share ram over a network would be stupid as well because internal ram speeds are mostly in the range of 1 - 3 Gigabit. Its possible, with the right software to share ram, but you will have a very very SLOW computer (since the processors would have to wait for the network to deliver stuff to local ram). Supercomputers use their own ram at each node for their own calculations, and when they finish the data they are working on, they send the information back to the head node of the machine. The head node then organizes the data and dispatches new data to that machine for it to process. [/QUOTE]

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