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Is it possible for two or more physical machines to be "grouped" into one virtual machine such that the CPU cores are shared?

Bob
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Yes, and no.

What you're talking about is not virtualization though, it's physical machine clustering. It can be accomplished with specialized software, hardware, and interconnects. Check out ScaleMP if you're interested in this. Ultimately, pooling hardware resources like this approaches the same sort of design of how supercomputers are made.

Virtualization machine clusters can be helpful to distribute workloads across many physical machines to solve singular workloads (think MapReduce).

Did that come close to what you were looking for?

cerberus
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Instead of lashing hosts together yourself, look to buy a scale up server.

Single systems running 4 or 8 CPU sockets are available. Much more than that is possible but gets closer to exotic custom clusters.

There are per VM vCPU and vRAM limits, but these days those tend to be quite large.

(And be thankful if your software is not licensed per core.)

John Mahowald
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  • I want as many sockets as possible. What's the largest number of sockets available? – Bob Feb 11 '17 at 19:33
  • We are not really in the business of product recommendations, contact your favorite hardware vendor for their 8 socket offerings. But on x86 the SGI UV line deserves special mention: up to 256 sockets / 4,096 cores. It is basically a supercomputer in a rack. Good luck getting your application and your budget to scale that far. – John Mahowald Feb 12 '17 at 00:52
  • what about AMD? I've been looking and seems max # sockets is 4 for current opteron. – Bob Feb 12 '17 at 00:53