Parallel Solving on two machines
 

Hello, I have started to discuss this topic in the past but I was probably in the wrong section.

I normally use Star CCM+ for my CFD work along with a few of my own codes which are not as computationally intensive. My current machine is a stand alone i7 920, I use the 4 cores in parallel to solve.

I would like to know if I could set-up another i7 machine and connect the two via a LAN switch would I be able to solve using 8 CPUs instead of 4? I ran on a cluster for years where we had a head node that was also the license server and you submitted a job on the head node and it would distribute to several nodes for solving.
If I can set-up two i7 machines, what would the system look like? Asuming that I want to use Windows would I need Windows Server running on the head node which is also the license server? Then I would start Star CCM+ on the head node and specify "parallel on named hosts" as the solving method which would include the name of the second machine.

Forgive me if the question is stupid, I am not a HPC expert by any means.

Thank you.

Yep this works just fine. Under 4 machines or so, you do not need to do any fancy networking (as long as you have decent sized cases, like 2+ million cells in Star-CCM+). I would buy a $30 gigabit switch to dedicate to these two machines.