Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 3 Sep 2003 12:36:10 -0700 | From | William Lee Irwin III <> | Subject | Re: Scaling noise |
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On Wed, 2003-09-03 at 12:00, William Lee Irwin III wrote: >> So as best as I can tell the proposal consists of using an orders-of- >> magnitude slower communication method to implement an underspecified >> solution to some research problem that to all appearances will be more >> expensive to maintain and keep running than the now extant designs.
On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:11:55PM -0600, Steven Cole wrote: > You and Larry are either talking past each other, or perhaps it is I who > don't understand the not-yet-existing CC-clusters. My understanding is > that communication between nodes of a CC-cluster would be through a > shared-memory mechanism, not through much slower I/O such as a network > (even a very fast network). > From Karim Yaghmour's paper here: > http://www.opersys.com/adeos/practical-smp-clusters/ > "That being said, clustering packages may make assumptions that do not > hold in the current architecture. Primarily, by having nodes so close > together, physical network latencies and problems disappear."
The communication latencies will get better that way, sure.
On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:11:55PM -0600, Steven Cole wrote: >> I like distributed systems and clusters, and they're great to use for >> what they're good for. They're not substitutes in any way for tightly >> coupled systems, nor do they render large specimens thereof unnecessary.
On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 01:11:55PM -0600, Steven Cole wrote: > My point is this: Currently at least one vendor (SGI) wants to scale the > kernel to 128 CPUs. As far as I know, the SGI Altix systems can be > configured up to 512 CPUs. If the Intel Tanglewood really will have 16 > cores per chip, very much larger systems will be possible. Will you be > able to scale the kernel to 2048 CPUs and beyond? This may happen > during the lifetime of 2.8.x, so planning should be happening either now > or soon.
This is not particularly exciting (or truthfully remotely interesting) news. google for "BBN Butterfly" to see what was around ca. 1988.
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