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Date:      Fri, 28 Jun 2002 00:41:58 -0400
From:      "Gary Thorpe" <gat7634@hotmail.com>
To:        brooks@one-eyed-alien.net
Cc:        arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Larry McVoy's slides on cache coherent clusters
Message-ID:  <F43qR77bieLYCT4aJ6p00000244@hotmail.com>

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>From: Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net>
>To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
>CC: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@flugsvamp.com>,Julian Elischer 
><julian@elischer.org>,"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog@FreeBSD.ORG>, 
>arch@FreeBSD.ORG
>Subject: Re: Larry McVoy's slides on cache coherent clusters
>Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 15:26:16 -0700
>
[...]
> > The 65,536 processor machine that Good Year built for modelling
> > laminar airflow on the full shuttle airframe was purpose built
> > hardware with a seperation of 2.  So were most of the Connection
> > Machine series from Thinking Machines, Inc..
>
>For things you can actually buy, anything over 2 CPUs from SGI falls into
>this catagory (and many of the dual CPU systems are actually unconnected
>dual nodes from larger systems.)

Which is how redundancy *can* be implemented in a NUMA machine. Since 
nothing is centralized (no main cpu or memory bus to share), it should be 
possible to make the system more easily resistant to hardware failure.

>
>IIRC ASCI-Red (the first Teraflop supercomputer) actually runs
>on something like the CC model.  It's made of dual CPU PII systems
>(actually, it started with PPros and was upgraded with those weird PPro
>form-factor PII Xeons) but acts something like a single system image.
>It's a bit more complicated then that since the service portion runs an
>OSF/1 derivative in a sort of single system image mode, but most nodes
>run a lightweight dedicated OS.

You mean like a microkernel? I have seen references to "cellular" computing, 
where each node has its own microkernel to do low management for that node 
and have all the nodes's microkernels cooperate to have a functioning 
system. Isn't this fundamentally different from how Linux/FreeBSD work?


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