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I want to run an unmodified MS Windows application, distributed across multiple machines. Can I extend its Symmetric Multiprocessing support to span multiple CPUs on multiple machines? Instead of just a single machine.

Ben Pilbrow
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unixman83
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1 Answers1

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What you're probably looking for is called Single System Image.

It's not a popular approach due to it own complexity and has it's own set of issues. For instance what would happen if a node went down or offline and took a running thread with it. So your program or an API would have to be able to detect and deal with that issue.

So I don't think you'll get away from having to customize your application to run on a cluster. You're probably better off using one of the more popular distributed computing APIs.

3dinfluence
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  • @unixman83 - SSI is a viable possible solution to your question. I would caution additionally that the incremental performance return for large farms has a significant plateau, where this occurs is heavily dependent on the hardware in question. You may want to consider the size of your farm and compare that to published metrics for various clustering software before making a decision. – Tok Dec 01 '10 at 17:20
  • I was wanting to run unmodified MS Windows applications written for Symmetric Multiprocessing. Modified question. – unixman83 Dec 02 '10 at 17:35
  • Not my area of expertise but I would think that's not going to be possible. But look into MS's HPC offerings. They do provide an API, job broker, etc. But it probably doesn't work the way you want and would certainly require the application be written to work with their APIs. – 3dinfluence Dec 02 '10 at 18:58