3 ms·

Well, it's clearly not for Personal Computing, nor will anyone run DOS on it. It's a Single System Image (SSI) system. Some DB which can't be (effectively) cl

Well, it's clearly not for Personal Computing, nor will anyone run DOS on it. It's a Single System Image (SSI) system. Some DB which can't be (effectively) clustered and other software which doesn't scale out well (or hasn't been rewritten yet to make use of distributed computing) demands such.

sbierwagen 6y ago
Then the obvious compromise tile is "869 Xeon Cores in one SSI" :) This makes it clear that it's not a normal computer, but a weird hyperexpensive proprietary cluster thing that normal people won't be interested in.
- mlyle 6y ago
  It's a really big single computer-- that's what SSI -means-. Yes, shared memory over the most distant cores will be slow. > but a weird hyperexpensive proprietary cluster thing that normal people won't be interested in Yes, I'm probably not going to use it to play Cyberpunk 2077 or run Microsoft Office. But this is Hacker News. The existence of things like this should rationally lead people to question scale-out in some cases. If you know the ceiling of how large of a machine you can throw at an unusual problem is very high, you may not want to dedicate the expensive engineering effort to scale out very early. After all, even very, very high end computing is cheap and people are very expensive.
  - sbierwagen 6y ago
    Hmm, I don't know. It occupies a strange spot in the demand curve, doesn't it? Below C1M, you use commodity hardware. Above C100M, you're forced to use distributed systems, since no single machine can possibly handle the load. But if you're in a startup, like many HN users, you have to fulfill Investor Storytime. In this consensual hallucination, everyone pretends the company can hockey stick at any minute. In this environment, you can't have hard limits. If the investors ask "What if traffic goes up by 1,000x?" you can't say "We die", because then you become unemployed. So this thing is purely for companies with predictable loads... stable, established companies. Enterprises! Resume poison! Nobody in this economy would be so foolish as to admit experience with enterprise software, IBM z series(!), lest ye be cursed forevermore with its taint. Throw salt over your left shoulder, spit three times... A good HN user only uses cloud autoscaling, serverless, Lambda, anything to stay out of bank IT shops, where you're paid $70k a year and get outsourced at the drop of a hat. I now understand why OP died with a mere 22 votes. Better I should forget the acronym "SSI" entirely, lest it contaminate me, become fallen... I clear my mind, think of web scale, BigTable...

sbierwagen 6y ago

Then the obvious compromise tile is "869 Xeon Cores in one SSI" :) This makes it clear that it's not a normal computer, but a weird hyperexpensive proprietary cluster thing that normal people won't be interested in.

mlyle 6y ago
It's a really big single computer-- that's what SSI -means-. Yes, shared memory over the most distant cores will be slow. > but a weird hyperexpensive proprietary cluster thing that normal people won't be interested in Yes, I'm probably not going to use it to play Cyberpunk 2077 or run Microsoft Office. But this is Hacker News. The existence of things like this should rationally lead people to question scale-out in some cases. If you know the ceiling of how large of a machine you can throw at an unusual problem is very high, you may not want to dedicate the expensive engineering effort to scale out very early. After all, even very, very high end computing is cheap and people are very expensive.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Hmm, I don't know. It occupies a strange spot in the demand curve, doesn't it? Below C1M, you use commodity hardware. Above C100M, you're forced to use distributed systems, since no single machine can possibly handle the load. But if you're in a startup, like many HN users, you have to fulfill Investor Storytime. In this consensual hallucination, everyone pretends the company can hockey stick at any minute. In this environment, you can't have hard limits. If the investors ask "What if traffic goes up by 1,000x?" you can't say "We die", because then you become unemployed. So this thing is purely for companies with predictable loads... stable, established companies. Enterprises! Resume poison! Nobody in this economy would be so foolish as to admit experience with enterprise software, IBM z series(!), lest ye be cursed forevermore with its taint. Throw salt over your left shoulder, spit three times... A good HN user only uses cloud autoscaling, serverless, Lambda, anything to stay out of bank IT shops, where you're paid $70k a year and get outsourced at the drop of a hat. I now understand why OP died with a mere 22 votes. Better I should forget the acronym "SSI" entirely, lest it contaminate me, become fallen... I clear my mind, think of web scale, BigTable...