From owner-freebsd-arch Thu Jun 27 16: 1:35 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from overcee.wemm.org (12-232-114-102.client.attbi.com [12.232.114.102]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 580FD37B400; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 16:01:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from wemm.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by overcee.wemm.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4F3B3390F; Thu, 27 Jun 2002 16:01:24 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from peter@wemm.org) X-Mailer: exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001 with nmh-1.0.4 To: Terry Lambert Cc: Julian Elischer , "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" , arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Larry McVoy's slides on cache coherent clusters In-Reply-To: <3D1B7391.38F10284@mindspring.com> Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 16:01:24 -0700 From: Peter Wemm Message-Id: <20020627230124.4F3B3390F@overcee.wemm.org> 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 Terry Lambert wrote: > Julian Elischer wrote: > > Not "overly impressed" is not quite accurate.. > > > > "not sure that it was relevant to us" is more to the point > > > > He was against making the system scale to N processors where N is a large > > number, stating that if corrupted the system too much to have > > such fine grained locking, and that such large-scale > > MP situations should be achieved with clusters of "Small-N" > > machines, connected together by higher level constructs. > > > > I did take some mental notes from the meeting. > > e.g. "make sure we don't make our kernel TOO fine grained. > > You should read the slides at http://www.bitmover.com/cc-pitch/ ; > it should take you all of four minutes, if you skip the loading > of the picture in slide 29, or if you have a fast link. Yes, he does make a good case, and the dangers that he talks about are one of the things that we keep in mind. We made a concious decision to avoid going crazy with locks. We are not targeting 10,000 cpu systems (4 or even 8 would be really nice though as long as it isn't too expensive). Clustering or the SSI as he describes would also be nice to have, but we do not have sufficient active developer resources to throw at it yet. Having said that, let the paper speak for itself. Otherwise we'll be arguing acronyms and trying to classify system designs etc for weeks. Less talking and more doing would be much better. Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com "All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message