merging servers into one

Gentoopc · Guru Joined: 25 Dec 2017 Posts: 403

Hello forum. Tell me, for example, there are three servers that I rented. Each of them has a 96-core CPU. Is there any software that will allow me to combine these servers into one and work with it as a 288-core server? Is it possible to install any desktop operating system on such a 288-core server?

loravis · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2024 Posts: 4

I don't think that's possible, at least I wasn't able to find something like this on the internet. What would you need this kind of setup for?

alamahant · Advocate Joined: 23 Mar 2019 Posts: 3948

Try Openstack and create your own personal cloud.
It will create a pool of resources and then you can create a tenant or VM with all these resources.
Or maybe VmWare has some solution for you.You have to check it out.
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Banana · Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2025 10:13 am Post subject:

In short: You need to "combine" them. Like using them for virtualiziation. They would be the hosts and running on top of them would be VMs which could use the resources from the hosts.
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pingtoo · Posted: Tue Jan 14, 2025 11:45 am Post subject: Re: merging servers into one

Ralphred · l33t Joined: 31 Dec 2013 Posts: 707

The only thing I've come across that did this was a pre-ESXi version of VMWare, it was very niche, the overhead was ridiculous (as was the infrastructure for it), and whilst it did what you are suggesting it's goal was uncommonly high "HA".
The paradigm has inverted since then, now we have promox and ceph et al running/shifting a bunch of "small" containers amongst "large" machines, instead of a bunch of "small" machines under a "large" hypervisor.

szatox · Advocate Joined: 27 Aug 2013 Posts: 3478

Distributing the workload at application level is one thing; it is how people usually handle it.
Actually, when I was checking out OpenMP, I had an impression it should be able to run a single application across several physical servers. I never had enough reason to actually use it myself though. "HPC" should be a good search keyword.

However, I also vaguely remember a huge Nutanix fanboy fawning over it's ability to pool resources from multiple physical servers into a single, virtual ESX host. Like a decade ago. So I guess the answer to the original question actually is "yes". Too bad, they're now advertising their wokeness rather than technical prowess. Still, if it has been done before, chances are you could find a usable implementation of this idea.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jan 26, 2025 5:03 pm Post subject:

Gentoopc,

Yes its possible. How useful it would be depends on the speed of the link between the physical servers and how much data needs to be moved about.
Normally, such systems are very closely physically located and have insanely fast interconnects.

Think supercomputers running lots of nodes consisting of commodity hardware. My favourite was The Stone SouperComputer
You probably want a Beowulf cluster of some sort.

Not all problems scale well, so it would only suit the class of problems that scale to suit.
If you run say open office on 288 cores, 287.995 cores will be waiting for your input. :)
Desktops don't scale.

== edit ==

The original article from Scientific American is behind a paywall :(
This page looks close.
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