Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2004 13:16:53 -0800 From: Alex Pavlovic <alex@taskforce-1.com> To: freebsd-cluster@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Clustering options Message-ID: <200411231316.53793.alex@taskforce-1.com> In-Reply-To: <1101172829.15634.5.camel@work.gusalmighty.com> References: <1101168686.3370.210.camel@work.gusalmighty.com> <20041122163244.M31380@knight.ixsystems.net> <1101172829.15634.5.camel@work.gusalmighty.com>
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On November 22, 2004 05:20 pm, Justin Hopper wrote: > Is there no appliance that allows for the details of the hardware to be > hidden from the OS and instead present to the OS a unified architecture, > like it's just one machine, but with the ability to add more nodes to > expand CPU, RAM, and disk? I guess this was my misunderstanding, as > this is what I assumed the blade systems did. I assume it would be > incredibly tricky to manage dynamically configurable hardware in the > operating system, but I also assumed that somebody had pulled it off, > but maybe not? There is. It's called SSI or single system image. Basically it provides you with single root, init and process space. Currently I know of two open source products that implement this ( OpenSSI and openMosix ). Unfortantely they are both targeted toward linux. openMosix seems to be geared toward computational aspects ( HPC ), while OpenSSI project is trying to unify various cluster factions and provide a "one size fits all" solution. There are some other papers on FreeBSD clusters that people have designed, my favourite is the one on a very nice general computing cluster published by Brooks Davis ( Aerospace Corporation ), look here: http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/papers/bsdcon2003/fbsdcluster.pdf There is also some information on the grid computing available here: http://people.freebsd.org/~brooks/pubs/usebsd2004/fbsdgrids.pdf Just something on the side, Manex Visual Effects actually used a 32 node FreeBSD cluster as the core rendering farm to make some of the special effects for the "Matrix" movie. You can read the story if you haven't already here: http://www.freebsd.org/news/press-rel-1.html Cheers. -- Alex Pavlovic TF-1
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