[nycbug-talk] BSD Cluster Filesystem Roundup

Miles Nordin carton at Ivy.NET
Tue Feb 24 23:57:49 EST 2009


>>>>> "ak" == Andy Kosela <akosela at andykosela.com> writes:

    ak> The main goals would still remain the same: single root,
    ak> single process space, single I/O and IPC space, virtual
    ak> network address space

oh, I suppose I could be wrong, but no, I don't think many 100 node
clusters are doing that!  They are batch not timesharing systems, and
are more interested in how to run one userspace program that is
specifically written for the cluster, and run it with low IPC latency
even at the cost of ponderous interfaces (RDMA), and in having a batch
job scheduler that can mark off commit-points and restart jobs
dispatched to nodes that crash.  Not interested in how to make 100
cheap systems feel like a single old expensive Unix dinosaur like the
college shell servers with 500 undergrads logged into them all running
'elm' or 'slrn' or something, timesharing jobs with erratic
performance requirements that justify this idea of ``migration'', and
because they are different users minimal IPC aside from the shared
filesystem and maybe pipes.  I think this idea of clusters is more
nostalgic than relevant:

 http://crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/2001-March/016820.html

sounds neat though, and I hadn't heard of OpenSSI before only of Mosix
so I'm glad for the reference.  I didn't know something like it was
part of Tru64.  I wonder if you get the Tru64 cluster package in the
copy of Tru64 you get from the ``developers and enthusiasts'' program?
probably not, but I have a copy of that, and I have two or three
alphas (though they're busy running NetBSD right now).
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