Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 5 Dec 2001 11:11:15 -0800 | From | Larry McVoy <> | Subject | Re: SMP/cc Cluster description [was Linux/Pro] |
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> 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.
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. If all OS images could share the same page cache, that's a first order approximation of an 16-way SMP OS with out all the locking. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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