7 ms·
Can someone ELI5 what this is?
by gberger 6y ago
Can someone ELI5 what this is?
- ealexhudson 6y agoIt looks like a multi-node version of Linux - a bit like a MOSIX or something - but without the limitation that the hardware needs to be the same on each node. E.g. you could have one X86, one ARM, one FPGA, and a single app could deploy threads across each of those "CPUs". Equally, I guess it looks a bit like a Java application server in terms of function - applications appear to be compiled to whichever hardware target the application needs to run on. Utility infrastructure like shared memory etc appears to be part of the design, so the underlying hardware systems are as transparent as possible.
- im_down_w_otp 6y agoIt's a single system image [1] platform built with Linux. The main idea being that the OS is running on multiple computers while presenting a single computer abstraction to the other software running on it. You write your program as though it's running on a monolithic machine, and the SSI platform manages it across multiple distributed machines. The concept is more popular in HPC & scientific computing than it is in mainstream IT. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image
- skellystudios 6y agoYou know, this is a great, clear description that they should definitely put on their homepage.
- choicenotchance 6y agoI think their diagram is decent enough to give a newbie on their website an idea.
- amachefe 6y agoaka Linux Cluster. This was very popular concept about 15yrs ago. I have seen telecom servers run in such kind of clusters
- SahAssar 6y agoAre you referring to servers running OTP (erlang)?
- eliaspro 6y agoSounds a bit like a Beowulf Linux cluster from about 20y ago. What's the major difference between the approach of those.
- detaro 6y agoBeowulf was just the idea of making a cluster of cheap commodity hardware using open software, typically not Single System Image.
- nineteen999 6y agoYeah I was thinking this sounds more like MOSIX, but with the added abstraction to handle executing the same code accross different architectures. http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html
- natmaka 6y agoIndeed, MOSIX or Kerrighed http://www.kerrighed.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page http://www.kerrighed.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
- willtim 6y agoBeowulf had no shared memory abstraction, programs had to be written using message passing, e.g. MPI. I'm not convinced a shared memory abstraction is a good thing for distribution across machines. Some Beowulf clusters actually had much lower latency interconnects than ethernet, e.g. Quadrics, but we still needed to carefully optimise the traffic. With a shared memory abstraction, such optimisation is out of our hands.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago1. Natalie Portman 2. Hot grits 3. ... 4. Profit! Maybe?
- Already__Taken 6y agoI can't find it but that sounds like the model a platform company that works with CCP to host EVE online makes. They program one game but they shard different sectors of the universe out to hardware based on demand. They either host it or it was just a tech demo they did with eve online. Wish I could remember it was a super cool job advert, not my skill set though.
- rasengan0 6y agoGreat explanation; I can't stop watching the teaser http://popcornlinux.org/sources/video/sosp-19-tutorial.mp4 http://popcornlinux.org/sources/video/sosp-19-tutorial.mp4
- secondo 6y agoThis is off topic, but it's proving hard to google. What's the significance of the hand gesture the women in the video makes at 1:13 and again at 1:39?
- uryga 6y agolooks like that clip of her is looped, so it might just be a random hand movement that looks meaningful bc you see it twice
- uryga 6y agowow, i sure feel dumb about this now! thank you, sibling commenters who actually know stuff :)
- neeleshs 6y agoIt is a prevalent hand gesture in the Indian subcontinent. Could mean a lot of things, and interpreted along with the facial expression. In this case, it means "That's pretty cool", looking at her facial expressions. It could mean "What the heck is going on?", when accompanied with a different facial expression.
- qubex 6y agoExactly the same in Italy. Weird, that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zabil 6y agoIt means "wow, impressive".
- c3534l 6y agoAh! I've been saying we should do this for years now. Everyone in the cloud space is reinventing the wheel when what we need is a cloud OS that abstracts away multiple computers. I can see a bright future for a project like this.
- bobbyi_settv 6y agoIn mainstream IT, you'd usually set up a Hadoop or Spark cluster on the machines and then write your code to run against one of those. What's the advantage of this approach over those?
- zekrioca 6y agoAutomatic vertical scaling without changing applications. One needs to rewrite apps in order to get the advantages of Hadoop/Spark/MapReduce in general, and not all problems are solved by simply doing that.. It is a different thing/paradigm, really
- shanavasm 6y agoHow is it different from Mesos - http://mesos.apache.org/ http://mesos.apache.org/ ?
- jbj 6y agoDoes this mean I can expand my thinkpad with one or more raspberry pi boards?
- choward 6y agoYou mean the intro paragraph isn't simple enough? > The Popcorn Linux project is exploring how to improve the programmability of emerging heterogeneous hardware, in particular, those with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-diverse cores, from node-scale (e.g., Xeon/Xeon-Phi, ARM/x86, CPU/GPU/FPGAs) to rack-scale (e.g., Scale-out processors, Firebox, The Machine), in both native and virtualized settings. Additionally, the project is exploring how to automatically compile/synthesize/execute code on ISA-heterogeneous hardware. I know some of those words!
- bdcravens 6y agoI think I bingo'ed at least 3 times.
- kroltan 6y agoLet's break it down! (I'm no expert so sorry for any mistakes, and this is simplifying a lot) > improve the programmability of emerging heterogeneous hardware reducing the fiddlyness of developing for mixed hardware > those with Instruction Set Architecture (ISA)-diverse cores those with multiple CPUs speaking different machine code > in both native and virtualized settings both bare-metal and VMs > automatically compile/synthesize/execute code on ISA-heterogeneous hardware automatically translate between the different machine codes. --- Now for what it actually means, is that Popcorn is a single Linux that can simultaneously run on a bunch of different processors (say, your mobile phone, a raspberry, and a desktop) all at once while being used just like a single Linux system to the end-user/programmer. I don't think it's meant to be used by consumers, but for servers or supercomputers, that kind of stuff.
- cbhl 6y agoPairing a big fast processor with a small energy-efficient processor is starting to get more common. You see it in a lot of higher end Android phones. I believe that the Touch Bar Macbooks also pair an x86_64 processor with an ARM coprocessor that runs the touch bar.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago> I don't think it's meant to be used by consumers, but for servers or supercomputers, that kind of stuff. Why would servers/supercomputers care about heterogeneous hardware (including multiple ISAs, even!)? If I'm playing around at home, that's great; I'd love to make a cluster out of a couple of old laptops, an old phone, and a Raspberry Pi. But at work, I'd just... buy a dozen identical servers. Even across generations, x86 is mostly uniform enough to just ignore the changes (with some minor gotchas around extensions, but if you only migrate forward that should be fine too).