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I want to set up distributed computing on my Local Area Network consisting a bunch of PCs. Say for the time being each one has the same OS - Windows 7.

Is there any opensource tool available so that I can share the resources of these PCs over the LAN and increase the speed of my applications and the memory space. I know that if its a graphics intensive application then, it is not very practical, because the speed of LAN is much slower than Graphics processors. But I only want to share general applications, some basic softwares, Programming language IDEs etc.

Can anyone shed some light on it? Thanks in Advance..

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Without spending money on specialized hardware and software, I would look into building a linux-based Beowulf cluster. The Wikipedia article lists some FOSS software that can be used to achieve this:

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  • Beowulf sounds gr8...so here I can attach a node running windows into the system? I need to run mainly windows application... Because primarily Beowulf is based on unix like OS, but using PVM and MPICH can I achieve parallel computing..... So PVM will divide my tasks into several fragments and send it to the group of computers and collect the result after computation is done..But I need to install the those PVMs into those windows nodes also am i right?
    – Prasenjit Chatterjee
    Apr 1, 2012 at 6:45
  • @Prasenjit: It's not that simple. PVM and MPICH come with tools that allow you to parallelize existing programs if you have the source code. But you can't just install PVM/MPICH on a bunch of computers and expect Visual Studio to run faster. The software has to be compiled to take advantage of the PVM virtual machine or MPICH's message passing library.
    – Lèse majesté
    Apr 1, 2012 at 7:32
  • Thanks very much for the clarification...so parallel processing is achieved from source code level, I was thinking, that these PVM stuffs will take the charge of process and thread scheduling from binary level and distribute across the attached nodes.
    – Prasenjit Chatterjee
    Apr 1, 2012 at 11:07
  • @Prasenjit: Nah, it's not that simple unfortunately. Just like programs have to be specifically written to be multithreaded to take advantage of multiprocessing, or written for a 64-bit OS to take advantage of a 64-bit CPU architecture, a piece of software also has to be written using MPI or PVM's API to take advantage of these parallel computing platforms.
    – Lèse majesté
    Apr 1, 2012 at 11:57
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I wouldn't reccomend windows 7 at all, you would need to switch to windows azure which is cloud based or windows server..

Heres what i would reccomend that would stay within open soruce

It's a big process to setup a cluster..proper network configuration I.E. infiniband or ethernet you need to install a linux server..Redhat , ubuntu ,gentoo , debian exc... setup resource and job management tools

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