help with a render farm-ish rig

i have 5 pretty old motherboards with cpus in them, i dont think any of them are faster than a GHz and i want to rig them all together and connect them to my pc to use as a farm for encoding video into mpeg 2 format. ive googled around trying to find a way to do this without having to set each mobo up with a hard drive and operating system. ideally what im looking to do is use these spare cpus as a mule for my comp, acting more as an extension of it than as a stand alone farm. if anyone could point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated, thanks.

 

You would need to do a LOT of modifications.

Remember, your motherboard has the BIOS
, IDE controllers, AGP/PCI controllers, math co-processor, North bridge controller, south bridge controller, etc that normally talks to the CPU. - If you were to attempt to connect 2 motherboards together, you'd first need a way for the CPU to communicate with EACH component on the 2nd board... not to mention getting the CPU to recognize it's all there. Then you'd need a way to power the 2nd board, which would mean another PSU would be needed, and you would have to wire the two PSUs so they would both turn on when the power button was pressed.

I'm sure it could be done with enough time, but it'd be more trouble IMO than it'd be worth.

 

I strongly suggest just buying a more powerfull PC as most budget machines now with a multicore proccess will be more powerfull than the set up you are after.

Or are you determinded to do that setup?

 

Look into a Beowulf Cluster setup if you want to go with that setup. A bit to complicated for me. I was trying to do this a couple of years ago.

http://www.beowulf.org/overview/index.html

 

im pretty determined captain.

 

Hey spanktastic, i know you said you would like to do it with out each having ther own HDD & OS but from my understanding [which is actually quite little] it would be a LOT easier if they did, and you could get a few old hdd's for buttons if not free, from friends and or friendly [small] 'puter shops.

just my 2cents

this might be something id look into doing myself in the not too distant future, and it would be cool if you could let us know which way yuo go with it and how it goes.

 

i have plenty of old hdds, ranging from 2 to 10 gigs, which should be fine for my uses but i dont want to have a rig with a bunch of standalone computers running computations, it just seems like a huge waste to me, the only thing ill be making use of is the processor so i would prefer to keep it as bare as possible. i know its going to be one heck of a project but if im going to do it why not go all the way and do it right.

 

Fairplay mate....

Your a better man geek than me


I dont think i could resist taking the easier option in this case.

Kudos