On May 8, 2014, at 10:30 AM, Ellis H. Wilson III <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 05/08/2014 10:29 AM, John Hearns wrote: >> Forget building compute clusters - soon we will be building Beowulfs >> with disk drives! > > Color me dubious. I highly doubt there will be any entire clusters of just > HDDs anytime soon. The cpu/ram you can fit on them will be far lower than a > full machine, even if you consider 16 of them or so. This is the end goal of Hadoop clusters. Not everything needs fast CPUs and a ton of RAM. > What these will be good at (and what the Active Disk research espouses) is > applying very simple filters (e.g., simple greps) to avoid pushing data > across buses needlessly. Yes, and there are a number of data-oriented devices in the works (not just drives) that capitalize upon this idea and treat the CPU as just a means to do ET in ETL before data leaves the storage device. Being able to run an SQL query directly on a disk has a lot of benefits. Is this still a beowulf cluster? Probably not, but these sorts of devices have a lot of utility in HPC. We make heavy use of iSCSI on our largest machine, and we'd free up a fair amount of resources if we didn't have to wrap our iSCSI targets in iSCSI servers. Glenn _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
