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From: Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>, "Martin J. Bligh" <Martin.Bligh@us.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: SMP/cc Cluster description [was Linux/Pro]
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 09:33:42 -0500
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On Wednesday 05 December 2001 02:11 pm, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > If I give you 16 SMP systems, each with 4 processors and a gigabit
> > ethernet card, and connect those ethers through a switch, would that
> > be sufficient hardware?
>
> You've completely misunderstood the message, sorry, I must not have been
> clear. What I am proposing is to cluster *OS* images on a *single* SMP as a
> way of avoiding most of the locks necessary to scale up a single OS image
> on the same number of CPUs.
>
> It has nothing to do with clustering more than one system, it's not that
> kind of clustering.  It's clustering OS images.

So basically, you're just turning the per-processor data into a tree?

> To make it easy, let's imagine you have a 16 way SMP box and an OS image
> that runs well on one CPU.  Then a ccCluster would be 16 OS images, each
> running on a different CPU, all on the same hardware.
>
> DEC has done this, Sun has done this, IBM has really done this, but what
> none of them have done is make mmap() work across OS boundaries.

The shared memory clustering people are basically trying to make 
mmap+semaphores work across a high speed LAN.  Why?  Because it's cheap, and 
the programming model's familiar.

Approaching it all from a different direction, though.  Probably not of help 
to you...

Rob
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