From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Jun 27 11:18:39 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from hotmail.com (f115.law3.hotmail.com [209.185.241.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 07B2C37B400 for ; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 11:18:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail pickup service by hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 11:18:31 -0700 Received: from 149.99.116.196 by lw3fd.law3.hotmail.msn.com with HTTP; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 18:18:31 GMT X-Originating-IP: [149.99.116.196] From: "Gary Thorpe" To: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Larry McVoy's slides on cache coherent clusters Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 14:18:31 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Message-ID: X-OriginalArrivalTime: 27 Jun 2002 18:18:31.0944 (UTC) FILETIME=[0B16C080:01C21E07] Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG The slides seem to be talking about NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) machines which use CC (Cache Coherancy). These types of machines implement a cluster purely in hardware from what I have read of them (single memory address space is really distributed shared memory coordinated in hardware by high speed switches etc) and use much faster/lower latency communication methods. Examples would be SGI's Origin2000 and Origin3000 and maybe Sun's Starfire line. The big advantage is scaling and redundancy, since no one part of teh system is essential for the whole thing working (which is how clusters should also work ideally). I think this ties in to Mr. Lambert's question about the future of FreeBSD very much. I think the NUMA model will eventually dominate all future large systems in the next 10 years (and SMP will come to be standard on small systems) and FreBSD will probably have to run efficiently on them to compete with Linux etc. Having seemless clusters (by this I mean clusters that work as a single system with one system image and identity) would probably be a an interesting problem also, since only a few OSes have made any serious attempt at implementing them. PVM, MPI, and MOSIX cannot for example migrate I/O among machines (network load balancing maybe?). _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message