Message-Id: <5.2.1.1.0.20030907214214.01c25ac8@fluent2.pyramid.net>
Date: Sun, 07 Sep 2003 21:47:58 -0700
To: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>, "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
From: Stephen Satchell <list@fluent2.pyramid.net>
Subject: Re: Scaling noise
Cc: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>, "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com>,
       William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>,
       Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>, "Brown, Len" <len.brown@intel.com>,
       Giuliano Pochini <pochini@shiny.it>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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At 05:57 PM 9/7/2003 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
>That's not "a machine" that's ~1150 machines on a network.  This business
>of describing a bunch of boxes on a network as "a machine" is nonsense.

Then you haven't been keeping up with Open-source projects, or the 
literature.  The development of virtual servers composed of clusters of 
Linux boxes on a private network appears to be a single machine to the 
outside world.  Indeed, a highly scaled Web site using such a cluster is 
indistinguishable from one using a mainframe-class computer (which for the 
past 30 years have been networks of specialized processors working together).

The difference is that the bulk of the nodes are on a private network, not 
on a public one.  Actually, the machines I have seen have been on a weave 
of networks, so that as data traverses the nodes you don't get a bottleneck 
effect.

It's a lot different than the Illiac IV I grew up with...

Satch


-- 
"People who seem to have had a new idea have often just stopped having an 
old idea." -- Dr. Edwin H. Land  

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