remote operation or admin

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 01:01:45PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
> What is most important in my considerations are, how might it to possible
> to stretch our present smp software to be able to extend the management
> domains to cover multiple computers?  Some sort of a bridge here, because
> there is no software today (that I'm awarae of, and that sure leaves a huge
> set of holes) that lets you manage the cores as separate computers) so that
> maybe today I might be able to have an 8 or 10 core system, and maybe
> tomorrow look at the economic and software possibility of having a 256 core
> system.  I figure that there would need to be some tight reins on latency,
> and you would want some BIGTIME comm links, I dunno, maybe not be able to
> use even Gigabit ethernet, maybe needing some sort of scsi bus linkage,
> something on that scale?  Or, is Fiber getting to that range yet?
> 
> Anyhow, is it even remotely posible for us to be able to strech our present
> SMP software (even with it's limitation on word size to limit the range to
> 32 processors) to be able to jump across machines?  That would be one hell
> of a huge thing to consider, now wouldn't it?

Ahh, you're talking about parallel computing, "clustering", or "grid
computing".  The Linux folks often refer to an implementation called
Beowulf:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_%28computing%29

I was also able to find these, more specific to the BSDs:

http://www.freebsd.org/advocacy/myths.html#clustering
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-cluster/2006-June/000292.html
http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster/

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                    jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                           http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                      Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.                  PGP: 4BD6C0CB |