I have two laptops with the following specs and I want to connect them to increase memory so that I can increase the performance of the scientific calculations that I need to do at home.
HP Pavilion dv6 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz 3.00 GB RAM
Sony Vaio PCG-384L Intel (R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7700 @2.40GHz 2.00GB RAM
By the way, Sony laptop does not have a monitor, which is broken, so I am using it with an external monitor.
Now, I want to connect these laptops so that my MATLAB, Fortran and C++ programs run better. From time to time, I need to use my home computers to do some work. So, how can I achieve that? What would I need to buy or install to the systems?
The most important point that bears my mind is that I also run Mac OS X with my Sony laptop, but I cannot run it with HP because it does not support VT-X. Is there anything special that I have to do in order to run Mac still after I connect these laptops?
Kubuntu 12.04 is installed in HP, Ubuntu 12.04 is installed in Sony (I prefer Kubuntu for my HP laptop for several reasons and therefore I do not want to change it).
I know this is a long question, but I couldn't figure out what to do.
Thank you
12 Answers
If you mean you want to run the computers as a computer cluster, so that you can use the processors and RAM as one computer, I think you'll want to use the TORQUE program ... I've never used it, but I'm pretty sure that's what it's for.
1The only way to make use of the two computers in your situation is to have a programm that is intended to run on multiple separate computers, and run that on both computers.
It is true that there are general solutions to distribute computing work to multiple computers, but if that would make sense in your situation, you would know it already, I'm sure.
So all you need is a network connection between the computers, with ssh access.
Your Fortran programs etc will not run "better", but they can run two times in parallel. If you really want to make use of both computers in some combined way from your programs, you need to add support for that to them.
In this case, you would need the technical infrastructure you asked about - but that is not a problem:
It's typically just a bunch of libraries and control programs that need to be installed on both computers.
For example, you could use MPI.
