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While I strongly agree with bcantrill, I have to disagree with your HPC origins model in the most strenuous fashion. The HPC world can be thought of as an alte

While I strongly agree with bcantrill, I have to disagree with your HPC origins model in the most strenuous fashion. The HPC world can be thought of as an alternative universe, one where dinosaurs came to some sort of lazy sentience instead us mammals. HPC RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) requirements and demands are profoundly different and profoundly lower from what enterprise or even SMB (small & medium sized businesses) would find acceptable. There are or were interesting ideas in GPFS but that was long ago, far away, and sterile besides - not that it stops IBM squeezing revenue from locked-in customers. Some people in HPC do realize their insular state, but mostly there are hopes for things to be done better that were done better earlier (e.g. "declustered RAID") in the "real" world. Their ongoing hype is for yet-another-meta-filesystem built with feet of straw upon a pile of manure. The likes of Google infrastructure, are built instead on academic storage R&D, which has been a great source of ideas and interesting test implementations - log structured file systems, distributed hash tables, etc. There is some small overlap, for example in the work of Garth Gibson, but it's not a joint evolution at all.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
HPC as an alternative universe is a fine metaphor. Yet, I don't see how there's no comparison given HPC already had more RAS than I could get out of any Linux box for years. IBM SP2, SGI, and some Beowulf-style clusters had high-performance I/O, single-system image, distributed filesystems, and fault-tolerance where you wanted. That sounds a lot like what cloud market aimed for. On top of it, you had grid and metacomputing groups that spread it out across multiple sites with ease of use for developers. They developed in parallel and separately but there's lots of similarities. Many startups in HPC were taking HPC stuff to meet cloud-style requirements for years in terms of management, reliability, and performance. That it wasn't up to the standards of businesses is countered by how many bought those NUMA machines and clusters for mission-critical apps. A huge chunk of work in Windows and Linux in 90's and early 2000's went to trying to match their metrics in order to replace them on the cheap with x86 servers and Ethernet. So, yes, HPC was making stuff to meet tough, business needs that commercial servers and regular stacks couldn't compare to. That's despite number-crunching supercomputers being their main market.
- pinewurst 10y ago
  Maybe things have fallen back drastically then or we're using different definitions of HPC (it's the likes of weather or bombs for me). Supercomputer system MTBF numbers aren't high at all. Supercomputer storage is fault tolerant only by fortuitous accident and often requires week-long outages with destroyed data for software upgrades. These systems are built with the likes of dubious metafilesystems (I'm talking to you, Lustre) sitting on top of shaky file systems on top of junk-bin HW RAID systems almost guaranteed to corrupt your data over time. I think your overall statement is valuable with the global search/replace of "enterprise" for "HPC" - airline reservations or credit card processing. That's all I'm saying - HPC people (at least currently) are massively overrated as developers and as admins. Maybe it's all just a plan to extract energy from Seymour Cray's pulsar-like rotating remains?
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    " Supercomputer storage is fault tolerant only by fortuitous accident and often requires week-long outages with destroyed data for software upgrades." Have you tried Ceph or Sector/Sphere? Lustre is known to be crap while Ceph gets a lot of praise and Sector/Sphere has potential for reliability with good performance. I think you may just be stuck with tools that suck. I'll admit it was about 10+ years ago when I was knowledgeable of this area. It could've all gone downhill since. "That's all I'm saying - HPC people (at least currently) are massively overrated as developers and as admins. " I'll agree with that. It's one of reasons field built so much tooling to make up for it. ;)
    - drauh 10y ago
      Re CEPH vs Lustre: what's performance like? I've seen anecdotes quoting 3 GBps over Infiniband for Lustre. (I'm curious because I run an HPC installation with Lustre and NFS over XFS, and trying to think of the future. MBTF doesn't matter as much as raw speed while it actually runs.)
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago

nickpsecurity 10y ago

HPC as an alternative universe is a fine metaphor. Yet, I don't see how there's no comparison given HPC already had more RAS than I could get out of any Linux box for years. IBM SP2, SGI, and some Beowulf-style clusters had high-performance I/O, single-system image, distributed filesystems, and fault-tolerance where you wanted. That sounds a lot like what cloud market aimed for. On top of it, you had grid and metacomputing groups that spread it out across multiple sites with ease of use for developers. They developed in parallel and separately but there's lots of similarities. Many startups in HPC were taking HPC stuff to meet cloud-style requirements for years in terms of management, reliability, and performance. That it wasn't up to the standards of businesses is countered by how many bought those NUMA machines and clusters for mission-critical apps. A huge chunk of work in Windows and Linux in 90's and early 2000's went to trying to match their metrics in order to replace them on the cheap with x86 servers and Ethernet. So, yes, HPC was making stuff to meet tough, business needs that commercial servers and regular stacks couldn't compare to. That's despite number-crunching supercomputers being their main market.

pinewurst 10y ago
Maybe things have fallen back drastically then or we're using different definitions of HPC (it's the likes of weather or bombs for me). Supercomputer system MTBF numbers aren't high at all. Supercomputer storage is fault tolerant only by fortuitous accident and often requires week-long outages with destroyed data for software upgrades. These systems are built with the likes of dubious metafilesystems (I'm talking to you, Lustre) sitting on top of shaky file systems on top of junk-bin HW RAID systems almost guaranteed to corrupt your data over time. I think your overall statement is valuable with the global search/replace of "enterprise" for "HPC" - airline reservations or credit card processing. That's all I'm saying - HPC people (at least currently) are massively overrated as developers and as admins. Maybe it's all just a plan to extract energy from Seymour Cray's pulsar-like rotating remains?
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  " Supercomputer storage is fault tolerant only by fortuitous accident and often requires week-long outages with destroyed data for software upgrades." Have you tried Ceph or Sector/Sphere? Lustre is known to be crap while Ceph gets a lot of praise and Sector/Sphere has potential for reliability with good performance. I think you may just be stuck with tools that suck. I'll admit it was about 10+ years ago when I was knowledgeable of this area. It could've all gone downhill since. "That's all I'm saying - HPC people (at least currently) are massively overrated as developers and as admins. " I'll agree with that. It's one of reasons field built so much tooling to make up for it. ;)
  - drauh 10y ago
    Re CEPH vs Lustre: what's performance like? I've seen anecdotes quoting 3 GBps over Infiniband for Lustre. (I'm curious because I run an HPC installation with Lustre and NFS over XFS, and trying to think of the future. MBTF doesn't matter as much as raw speed while it actually runs.)
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago