Clustering options

[Frank Mayhar]

Justin Hopper wrote:
> Is there no appliance that allows for the details of the hardware to be
> hidden from the OS and instead present to the OS a unified architecture,
> like it's just one machine, but with the ability to add more nodes to
> expand CPU, RAM, and disk?  I guess this was my misunderstanding, as
> this is what I assumed the blade systems did.  I assume it would be
> incredibly tricky to manage dynamically configurable hardware in the
> operating system, but I also assumed that somebody had pulled it off,
> but maybe not?

Well, there's software that does that (or something like it), but not in BSD-land, at
least not yet.  Although I agitated hard to port what is now OpenSSI (see
http://www.openssi.org/) to FreeBSD back in 2000, they ported it to Linux instead,
sigh.  I would really love it if someone would actually pay me to do the port to
FreeBSD (or, better, to reimplement it).  But that's pretty unlikely.

So no, clustering support is thin on the ground for BSD.  Maybe someday, when Matt
manages to start work on his SSI stuff for Dragonfly.
-- 
Frank Mayhar frank at exit.com	http://www.exit.com/
Exit Consulting                 http://www.gpsclock.com/
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