Re: SMP/cc Cluster description

[Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>]

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 11:14:13AM -0800, Dana Lacoste wrote:
> Man you guys are NUTS.

I resemble that remark :-)

> > Did you even consider that this is virtually identical to the problem
> > that a network of workstations or servers has?  Did it occur 
> > to you that
> > people have solved this problem in many different ways?  Or 
> > did you just
> > want to piss into the wind and enjoy the spray?
> 
> I may be a total tool here, but this question is really bugging me :
> 
> What, if any, advantages does your proposal have over (say) a Beowulf
> cluster?  Why does having the cluster in one box seem a better solution
> than having a Beowulf type cluster with a shared Network filesystem?

Because I can mmap the same data across cluster nodes and get at it using
hardware, so a cache miss is a cache miss regardless of which node I'm
on, and it takes ~200 nanoseconds.  With a network based cluster, those
times go up about a factor of 10,000 or so.
-- 
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Larry McVoy            	 lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitmover.com/lm