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[Chuck Robey]

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Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> 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/
> 

Well, I am, and I'm not, if you could answer me one quiestion, then I would
probably know for sure.  What is the difference between our SMP and the
general idea of clustering, as typified by Beowulf?  I was under the
impression I was talking about seeing the possibility of moving the two
closer together, but maybe I'm confused in the meanings?
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