Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 11:29:54 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Frasnelli <dfrasnel@csee.wvu.edu> To: dbader@eece.unm.edu (David A. Bader) Cc: ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Ports category submission (fwd) Message-ID: <199807281530.LAA20430@naur.cs.wvu.edu> In-Reply-To: <199807280151.TAA16371@jalapeno.eece.unm.edu> from "David A. Bader" at "Jul 27, 98 07:51:44 pm"
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Greetings, > I think this is a great idea! I'm the maintainer of the "MPI" port > (mpich), and would volunteer to help out in any way with developing > this category. That's wonderful, glad to hear that more folks are interested. > The LinuxFolks have a similar distribution called ExtremeLinux which is a > descendent of the Beowulf project; and includes all of the tools necessary > to make a parallel cluster. Herein lay a "sticky point" which I may or may not catch flak for bringing up. The folks at the Beowulf project (and now ExtremeLinux) are building computational clusters, some which include facilities for DSM. Personally, I define a true "parallel cluster" as something which provides not only shared processor power, but also shared memory, a distributed filesystem, and (to some degree) a shared userspace. Granted, I haven't looked at the Beowulf documentation lately and they may have these facilities available now. One fellow I spoke to agreed with me that a true parallel cluster should appear as one system, in all aspects, to the developer or user. Many freely-available extensions for MPI/PVM exist to provide facilities such as a DSM (Adsmith), distributed filesystem (CODA provides an excellent base), virtual framebuffer, parallel I/O (ROMIO), etc. Providing a "virtual parallel environment" could possibly be achieved by implementing a subset of the Mach microkernel as a daemon or set of daemons whose peripherals are highly abstract and rely on external (network-bound) nodes for all services. In this sense, there could concurrently exist both a parallelized and "normal" layer of the operating system; userland could be a minimal subset of the monolithic system shared across a DFS. > As a category, I vote for any of: "hpc" (high performance computing), > "parallel" (parallel processing), or "cluster" (cluster computing). I second your nominations. Why don't we go all out and call it "wolfpack", just to ruffle Microsoft's feathers a bit (Just kidding :-) Best regards, Daniel --- Daniel J. Frasnelli Imaging spectroscopy research (dfrasnel@wvu.edu) Remotely sensed data analyst Ecologist Extreme backpacker To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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