home computer clusters

hello does anyone know of a device that easly connect pc together into a cluster.im thinking along the lines of say a pci card that has usb or fiewir port that would simply allow you to plug multiple ocs into one hub pc therefore collectivlly making them all one with the hub using all the other pcs processers as its own

It's done with regular hardware, it's mainly the software side that requires setup. Linux has a LOT of options for it, XP may have some too (i'm not sure).
But ya just (very)basically need 'puters, network cards, a router, cables etc and time. Depends what you want to do as well.

hey thanks for the quick reply ,but i all ready have dsl routerand 2 networked computers and this allows a very limited exchange what i was thinking was more along the lines of basically making all the pcs hooked to the hub pc like extra processors on tne same motherboard let the hub have complete control over them

From what I know your going to need more than a dsl router and with only 2 computers you wont notice much if any performance increase. What are you trying to do seti/boinc? I read about an attempt to get on the top 100 list (of supercomputers) by a big lan out in cali or something they hooked up all there computers to create a super computer. didnt work though : p Id google , Distributed Computing (theres a book on it but im not sure if its what u need more on theory), or anything along those lines.

I tried to do that in the past, a home computer cluster, and I hit a wall. From what I understand, Linux or Windows cannot link networked computers to simulate a single system. You need special software designed to do clustering, the software knows the IP address for each computers and the software itself distribute the processes across the network. That would not work for normal software designed for single computer like, let's say Photoshop, or for games. Then you would need gigabit network cards, otherwise the latency would make your cluster slower than a single computer.

A simpler solution, if you can afford it, would be to install Linux SMP with 4 processors on the same motherboard. I think that could run any software on all CPUs seemlessly?

The ticket to cheap home clustering is ClusterKnoppix, a custom linux distribution built with the OpenMosix kernel. Its got all the tools you need to build a cluster, and when running from the CD of each machine you can leave the HD untouched, which makes for fun in labs in whcih your not supposed to modify the operating system already on the computers, just power down, insert a ClusterKnoppix disk, reboot and configure.

ClusterKnoppix