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

[Kevin Brosius <kbrosius@kns.com>]

gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

Have you checked out MOSIX?  I've recently started trying it out. 
http://www.mosix.org.  It's a load sharing system, which works at the
Linux job scheduling level across the network.

-- 
Kevin Brosius


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