Cluster of computers.

[Kabir Shah]

I have 2 cpu at my place.
The one which I am using currently has 80GB hard disk and 512MB ram.
The second also has similar characteristics.
Now can I combine them, so that I have twice the performance.
Both are Intel CPUs.

[Peter Johnson]

Do you mean running as an application server with a web or HTTP interface, or do you mean as a desktop?

[Joe Ess]

Gurudas Bhandarkar wrote:
Now can I combine them, so that I have twice the performance.

Due to the overhead of splitting up processes and the fact that most tasks are either tied to a single process (how would one split up editing a Word document?) or limited by some other factor (usually disk or network IO), you will not get twice the performance if you try to cluster more than one computer.
As Peter hints, splitting up server tasks makes more sense, as each server request has its own context and does not depend on other requests (usually!). There are many "shrink wrapped" solutions for clustering computers, such as Ubuntu Cloud. These are usually targeted at enterprise servers.
If you are thinking of clustering your desktop, you are looking at a lot of effort for little payoff. You'd probably be better off updating your hardware to get better performance.

[Kabir Shah]

Thanks for the replies.

I am doing few experiment games, in which I want to speed up my search.
so for example, I programed a chess game,
I start off with Negamax,then alphabeta,then killer heuristics and then hashtable at the most i can add opening moves.
But now the thing is even after doing this I wont be able to get a search depth of 30plys within few seconds, this is where i want my hardware to increase my speed.

So asking about that.

[Joe Ess]

I'm not an expert in parallel processing and you have given us scant details of your hardware, so I can't speak to the performance benefits of clustering in your particular situation.
Personally, I consider my time fairly valuable. Given the choice between investing a lot of time in a clustering solution for questionable payoff or investing a few hundred dollars in a fast multi-core CPU and an almost guaranteed payoff, I'm going to choose the hardware upgrade.

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

But otherwise, you might consider something like MPI, which is an API designed for simple creation of distributed parallel programs. There's a Java version here. For the kind of project you're interested in, you would probably be able to get a 25% speedup or so; it's up to you to decide whether it's worth the effort.

[Peter Johnson]

You are not asking for a cluster, you are asking for a grid where individual tasks can be farmed off to nodes within the grid (much like what SETI@home does). You could look to see what open source grid software is out there (Hadoop could probably handle this) and then code to it.