8 ms·
I worked with one of these prototype boxes. I was using it for something a bit outside their common use case: clustered ETL processing of log data. I was quit
by DEinspanjer 16y ago
I worked with one of these prototype boxes. I was using it for something a bit outside their common use case: clustered ETL processing of log data. I was quite happy with the performance. In the workloads I had that needed lots of threads, I was able to use the box to spin up a lot of nodes and crunch through several hundred GB of log data very quickly. The machines were easy to work with since they felt like normal Linux nodes, and the interconnect fabric made inter-process communication very snappy.
- runT1ME 16y agoI'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine, or is it a 'cluster' in the sense that each node has a single processor? (You used both threads and inter-process, but also implied multiple nodes...)
- blhack 16y ago>I'm still confused, is it a single multiprocessor machine I would love to watch that thing boot, haha. SO many penguins!
- blhack 16y agoI apologize for the self-reply, but am I wrong here? I use mostly OpenBSD and linux only lives on servers that I don't physically see booting. I remember when I first starting using Linux, there would be one penguin for each processor core. Booting it up for the first time on a dual xeon machine and seeing 8 of them, was kindof funny in a nerdy way. Would this be different? If there are 512 cores...would it show a penguin for each core? Sorry, like I said, I haven't actually watched the boot process on a linux machine for quite some time, and now I'm a bit curious... Sorry if this question is juvenile or stupid or something.
- koenigdavidmj 16y agoMost likely it would be an 80x25 text console, no framebuffer in sight. Maybe even a serial console.
- wmf 16y agoYou're right; IIRC some SGIs show a whole screenful of penguins. But you're kind of derailing the conversation.
- hga 16y agoIt's a cluster, each node is a single core processor with a chipset chip, DIMM and 1/2 of an ASCI providing virtualized I/O (e.g. each core sees 4 virtual SATA drives) and an connection to a supercomputer style interconnect. Memory is not shared, each core is running it's own OS image.
- DEinspanjer 16y agoSorry I was rather vague there. Ultimately needed lots of parallelism. Smallest unit of parallelism in my ETL tool is threads. If you need more threads than one core or CPU can deliver, then you cluster out to multiple machines, and they communicate via sockets as needed.