Man you guys are NUTS.
But this is a fun conversation so I'm going to join in.
> Did you even consider that this is virtually identical to the problem
> that a network of workstations or servers has? Did it occur
> to you that
> people have solved this problem in many different ways? Or
> did you just
> want to piss into the wind and enjoy the spray?
I may be a total tool here, but this question is really bugging me :
What, if any, advantages does your proposal have over (say) a Beowulf
cluster? Why does having the cluster in one box seem a better solution
than having a Beowulf type cluster with a shared Network filesystem?
You've declared everything to be separate, so that I can't see
what's not separate any more :)
Is it just an issue of shared memory? You want to be able to share
memory between processes on separate systems at high speed? Why
not Myrinet then? Yeah, it's slower, but the order of magnitude
reduction in cost compared to a 64 way SMP box makes this a trivial
decision in my books....
Or am I missing something really obvious here????
Dana Lacoste
Embedded Linux Developer (The OPPOSITE side of the scale)
Ottawa, Canada
On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 11:14:13AM -0800, Dana Lacoste wrote:
> Man you guys are NUTS.
I resemble that remark :-)
> > Did you even consider that this is virtually identical to the problem
> > that a network of workstations or servers has? Did it occur
> > to you that
> > people have solved this problem in many different ways? Or
> > did you just
> > want to piss into the wind and enjoy the spray?
>
> I may be a total tool here, but this question is really bugging me :
>
> What, if any, advantages does your proposal have over (say) a Beowulf
> cluster? Why does having the cluster in one box seem a better solution
> than having a Beowulf type cluster with a shared Network filesystem?
Because I can mmap the same data across cluster nodes and get at it using
hardware, so a cache miss is a cache miss regardless of which node I'm
on, and it takes ~200 nanoseconds. With a network based cluster, those
times go up about a factor of 10,000 or so.
--
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm