Re: Scaling noise

Daniel Phillips
2003-09-04T17:02:08Z

On Thursday 04 September 2003 04:31, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> I view UP -> SMP -> NUMA -> SSI on NUMA -> SSI on many PCs -> beowulf
> cluster as a continuum ...

Nicely put. But the last step, ->beowulf, doesn't fit with the others,
because all the other steps are successive levels of virtualization that try
to preserve the appearance of a single system, whereas Beowulf drops the
pretence and lets applications worry about the boundaries, i.e., it lacks
essential SSI features. Also, the hardware changes on each of the first four
arrows and stays the same on the last one.

Regards,

Daniel