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is it possible?:) it wold be interesting, when given cheap chineese netbook and cheap chineese tablet, setup for example ubuntu to both of them, then le wild magic happens and viola - we have one mighty computer with more CPU cores, united RAM and video-card from the tablet:)

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Combining different independent computers is possible. The supercomputer Titan, e.g., is composed of 18,688 different nodes; each node has its own CPU, GPU and RAM.

The problem lies in the specific details of le wild magic. You need a distributed operating system (Titan uses UNICOS) and – as far as I know – there are no desktop versions.

But suppose you have a distributed OS in some popular Linux flavor and you actually combine the computing power of a netbook and a tablet. What have you gained?

Two slow CPUs won't be much faster than one for most tasks, since most actions you can perform with a netbook aren't very parallelizable. The system memory of each device will only be available to that CPU (making two 4 core CPUs very different from one 8 core CPU). You're also going to be able to use only one GPU for video output.

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No. If we could make computers twice as fast for just double the cost, we already would.

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    Not really an answer for not really a question. Mar 21, 2013 at 17:06
  • How is it not really an answer? Mar 21, 2013 at 17:08
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    I was going through the Low Quality review task which flagged this answer. I didn't think it should be deleted but felt compelled to comment. Seemed like a flippant comment rather than an answer to the question. Mar 21, 2013 at 17:12
  • Added a "No", should qualify as an answer now :).
    – terdon
    Mar 21, 2013 at 17:12
  • @BradPatton: It is an accurate and precise answer. It explains what would be the case if the answer was "yes" and it's quite clear that's not the case. Mar 21, 2013 at 17:14
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I know a lot of time has passed since this question was asked, but it is worth pointing out that this can in fact be mostly accomplished using modern cluster computing technologies.

Although (as mentioned by @ernie in the comments) these do not typically have user friendly interfaces (most don't have a GUI at all), they are very powerful once you learn how to use them, and are currently used by many Internet giants like Google, Twitter, &c to power their gargantuan web applications.

If you have any interest in learning more about these sort of technologies or deploying one to your own infrastructure, I highly suggest taking a look at Kubernetes, DC/OS, and Apache Mesos. These are each tools developed by Google LLC, Mesosphere Inc, and Twitter Inc respectively.

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