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But can we have a cluster of computers that look like a single computer sharing the underlying hardware, because that's just basically linking a remote device.
by yeukhon 10y ago
But can we have a cluster of computers that look like a single computer sharing the underlying hardware, because that's just basically linking a remote device. I supposed special kernel has to be written to overlay.
EDIT: Looks like this is already a thing [1]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image
- makmanalp 10y agoThat's not quite the issue - SSI (which I didn't know about!) sounds cool, but it's a programming model that solves similar issues at a different abstraction layer. The question that remains unsolved is, regardless of what abstraction you use, whether the overhead of communication (latency, throughput) between nodes is large enough to make things annoying, and whether it's possible to work around this effectively or not. Stuff like InfiniBand along with tech like RDMA is helping a lot with this, and hardcore database installations do use this.
- rhizome 10y agoSSI is awesome, and (IIRC) something DragonflyBSD was working towards once upon a time.