Re: Scaling noise

Stephen Satchell
2003-09-08T04:46:04Z

At 05:57 PM 9/7/2003 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
>That's not "a machine" that's ~1150 machines on a network. This business
>of describing a bunch of boxes on a network as "a machine" is nonsense.

Then you haven't been keeping up with Open-source projects, or the
literature. The development of virtual servers composed of clusters of
Linux boxes on a private network appears to be a single machine to the
outside world. Indeed, a highly scaled Web site using such a cluster is
indistinguishable from one using a mainframe-class computer (which for the
past 30 years have been networks of specialized processors working together).

The difference is that the bulk of the nodes are on a private network, not
on a public one. Actually, the machines I have seen have been on a weave
of networks, so that as data traverses the nodes you don't get a bottleneck
effect.

It's a lot different than the Illiac IV I grew up with...

Satch

--
"People who seem to have had a new idea have often just stopped having an
old idea." -- Dr. Edwin H. Land