There seem to be significant advantages using Scyld ClusterWare, I did
try it (Scyld?) many years ago (when it was free?) and I was impressed then.
However, when looking at penguincomputing.com I don't find any price
quotes. It seems - unless I miss something - one has to fill in a rather
lengthy form in order to get that information?
In order to consider the "Scyld solution" I think it would be good to
have at least an estimate of the price?
Regards,
/jon
Donald Becker wrote:
On Wed, 1 Oct 2008, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
On Tue, 30 Sep 2008, Donald Becker wrote:
Ahhh, your first flawed assumption.
You believe that the OS needs to be statically provisioned to the nodes.
That is incorrect.
Well, you also make the flawed assumption that the best technical
solutions are always preferred. From my position I have seen many
...
a solution like Scyld's limits the whole cluster to running one
distribution (please correct me if I'm wrong), while a solution with
node "images" allows mixing Linux distributions at will.
That's correct. Our model is that a "cluster" is a single system -- and a
single install.
That's for a good reason: To keep the simplicity and consistency of
managing a single installation, you pretty much can have... only a single
installation.
There is quite a bit of flexibility. The system automatically detects the
hardware and loads the correct kernel modules. Nodes can be specialized,
including mounting different file systems and running different start-up
scripts. But the bottom line is that to make the assertion that remote
processes will run the same as local processes, they have to be running
pretty much the same system.
If you are running different distributions on nodes, you discard many of
the opportunities of running a cluster. More importantly, it's much
more knowledge- and labor-intensive to maintain the cluster while
guaranteeing consistency.
The only times that it is asked to do something new (boot, accept a
new process) it's communicating with a fully installed, up-to-date
master node. It has, at least temporarily, complete access to a
reference install.
I think that this is another assumption that holds true for the Scyld
system, but there are situations where this is not true.
Yes, there are scenarios where you want a different model. But "connected
during important events" is true for most clusters. We discard the
ability for a node to boot and run independently in order to get the
advantages of zero-install, zero-config consistent compute nodes.
If you design a cluster system that installs on a local disk, it's
very difficult to adapt it to diskless blades. If you design a
system that is as efficient without disks, it's trivial to
optionally mount disks for caching, temporary files or application
I/O.
If you design a system that is flexible enough to allow you to use
either diskless or diskfull installs, what do you have to loose ?
In theory that sounds good. But historically changing disk-based
installations to work on diskless machines has been very difficult, and
the results unsatisfactory. Disk-based installations want to do selective
installation based on the hardware present, and write/modify many links
and configuration files on installation -- many more than they "need" to.
The same node "image" can be used in several ways:
- copied to the local disk and booted from there (where the copying
could be done as a separate operation followed by a reboot or it can
be done from initrd)
- used over NFS-root
- used as a ramdisk, provided that the node "image" is small enough
While memory follows the price-down capacity-up curve, we aren't quite to
the point where holding a full OS distribution in memory is negligible.
Most distributions (all the commercially interesting ones) are
workstation-oriented, and the trade-off is "disk is under $1/GB, so we
will install everything". It's foreseeable that holding an 8GB install
image in memory will be trivial, but that will be a few years in the
future, not today. And we will need better VM and PTE management to make
it efficient.
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