Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1999 17:00:09 -0500 From: Christian Kuhtz <ck@adsu.bellsouth.com> To: Licia <licia@o-o.org> Cc: smp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: smp and clustering Message-ID: <19990121170009.K5050@oreo.adsu.bellsouth.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990121130405.24959A-100000@o-o>; from Licia on Thu, Jan 21, 1999 at 01:06:41PM -0600 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.990121130405.24959A-100000@o-o>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, Jan 21, 1999 at 01:06:41PM -0600, Licia wrote:
>
> I'm becoming interested in the concept of clustering computers (at least
> I believe that's the term for what I'm interested in :) ) and I was wondering
> if someone could advise me as to the feasibility of modifying the SMP system
> in FreeBSD to support sharing processors and memory with a completely separate
> computer, over a high speed ethernet connection?
Depends on how you define feasibility. What you're talking about is probably a
distributed memory system, which is quite different from a shared memory system
(SMP).
AFAIK, from having thought about that a while back, it would be a (IMHO)
fairly complex change, since FreeBSD wasn't designed from ground up to be that
kind of box. When you have shared memory, you can "cheat" with interprocessor
communication (because you got lots of it and it is very fast). Compared with
distributed memory, where you have usually (among many other things) a fairly
low speed internode link, you need to do things a little differently.
You may want to experiment with PVM (and cohorts) if you are interested in
distributed memory concepts. And you probably want to get familiar with MPI.
Check out any of the well known supercomputing sites (or PVM's homepage for
instance) for details. PVM, MPI and variants/related packages is was most
people use these days when they talk about clusters (unless you got a very
specialized machine).
There's a very good book on clusters, btw..
Gregory F. Pfister
In Search Of Clusters
ISBN 0-13-899709-8
US$44.95
Cheers,
Chris
--
"Logic is a little bird, sitting in a tree; that smells *awful*."
-- /usr/bin/fortune
[Disclaimer: I speak for myself and my views are my own and not in any way to
be construed as the views of BellSouth Corporation. ]
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-smp" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990121170009.K5050>