Combining PC Power

I'm not sure if I'm asking this in the right section but anyway. I'm wondering if it is possible to combine multiple PC's together and use them as one monster machine. I don't mean server machine with multiple CPU's etc, I mean combining separate computers together to create the illusion of "one" powerful PC. Any thoughts?

 

Hello Lynx, welcome to Major geeks.

It's not an illusion.

There was an article in SCIAM (Scientific American) in the mid to late 90s about university departments doing just that with all the old pcs they could lay hands on. This was to aggregate the computing power to make better research tools.
The article gave sufficient detail to replicate the systems.

I am not an folding expert but I think the Geeks folding thread links into a modern version of this .

 

It is called parallel computing or clustering:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_(computing)

There is an article about a junkman that built a supercomputer like this.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/05/52669