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On a side note, when did this term "compute" work its way into the lexicon? "Compute nodes", etc. I don't recall this being a term until the last year or so.
by supportengineer 3y ago
On a side note, when did this term "compute" work its way into the lexicon? "Compute nodes", etc. I don't recall this being a term until the last year or so.
- jacquesm 3y agoWith Plan 9 or so in the previous century?
- dragontamer 3y agoMost supercomputer clusters are divided into compute-nodes vs management nodes. I'd have to imagine the language was popular as far back as the 1980s in the high-performance computing realm...
- marcosdumay 3y agoThere are also IO nodes, that talk to disks and network. Mainframes use those names too. I'm not sure what name blade hacks use (yeah, I'm out of a datacenter for that long), but they have those things too.
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoSupercomputers were not clusters like we have today until the mid-90's. In the first written description of how to build a Beowulf cluster, by Radajewski and Eadline in 1998 [1], the management node was refered to as the "server node" and the compute nodes as "client nodes". I believe the term "compute node" was first used in the context of the Intel ASCI Red supercomputer that was installed at Sandia in 1997. This later led to the Cray XT3, XT4, XT5 families of machines that used the same terminology. But I believe the term was not in generic usage outside of those specific supercomputers until around 2005-2010. [1] https://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOWTO.html#ss2.2 https://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/archive/Beowulf-HOW...
- wharvle 3y agoI don't recall ever seeing or hearing "compute" used as anything but a verb until several years into the rise of the "cloud".
- emddudley 3y agoI first noticed people referring to "compute" as a resource around maybe 2016.
- declaredapple 3y agoI've seen this a lot in contexts with specific workloads the last 10 years or so. With both physical space and PCIE lanes being factors, as well as how you handle virtualization/barebones setups. This can help with simplifying failover as well for HA. For example, storage servers usually are full to the brim of harddrives and SSDs. Then you might need to process your data on GPUs/CPUs where you have specific servers specced out with more CPU/GPU resources.