Re: Scaling noise

Larry McVoy
2003-09-08T05:26:36Z

On Sun, Sep 07, 2003 at 09:47:58PM -0700, Stephen Satchell wrote:
> 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.

Err, I'm in that literature, dig a little, you'll find me. I'm quite
familiar with clustering technology. While it is great that people are
wiring up lots of machines and running MPI or whatever on them, they've
been doing that for decades. It's only a recent thing that they started
calling that "a machine". That's marketing, and it's fine marketing,
but a bunch of machines, a network, and a library does not a machine make.
Not to me it doesn't. I want to be able to exec a proces and have it land
anywhere on the "machine", any CPU, I want controlling tty semantics,
if I have 2300 processes in one process group then when I hit ^Z they
had all better stop. Etc.

A collection of machines that work together is called a network of
machines, it's not one machine, it's a bunch of them. There's nothing
wrong with getting a lot of use out of a pile of networked machines,
it's a great thing. But it's no more a machine than the internet is
a machine.
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm