Re: PLUG letterhead (was: Re: [PLUG] Fwd: plug meeting at usip.edu - fyi)

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2001 at 03:53:22PM -0400, Darxus@chaosreigns.com wrote:
> You should've tied him up & drug him to the meeting.  Guillermo, the guy
> who built the thing, was there, and told us a bit about it.  Actually, you
> should probably get this person to talk to Guillermo.

The professor in question is a she. ;^>

I'm actually quite familiar with how beowulf clusters work, and I
don't like them very much. I wan something that's architecture-
independent, that adapts appropriately to varying ability in its
nodes, and that exports at least the majority of the Unix userland
interface to the network level (so that connecting to the cluster
places processes on various machines without the user having to do
anything special to get them there).

Beowulf's failings, in my eyes, are that it's pretty much i386 only
(um, sure, so Linux runs on alphas and some powerpcs too... but go
look at http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/; regardless, I've read nothing
of anyone building a beowulf cluster out of non-i386 machines), that
it presumes all the machines in the cluster are basically the same
(with regard to process placement for load balancing), and that
writing software for it is still an exercise in parallel
programming.

Which is not to say that it's not useful, but I think it's possible
to do better.

-- 
       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net


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