Windows 7 – Is it possible to combine processing power of 2 computers?

Here are a few questions, I wish you could enlighten me.

  1. Is it possible to combine processing power of 2 computers?
  2. How do I do it?

Solution:

Not transparently where a running program can somehow use the second machine to execute code, since they are logically separate with no way for the cpu to communicate or access each other’s memory.

That doesn’t mean you can’t combine processing power:

  1. Specific software might have components that can execute on other machines, e.g. protein folding, SETI @ home.  These tend to be specialized, i.e. you can’t start up Excel and tell it to use another computer for computation.
  2. If you are doing processor intensive tasks, you could use the secondary machine to run them, e.g. encoding/recoding a video stream.

If you are looking to harness the secondary computer in any way, being able to remote control it is crucial.  Two ways to do this are via some sort of remote access (RDP, VNC) or alternatively something like synergy+.