[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Now that since nearly anyone's taking of more resources is increasingly > robbing and disrupting other users, has sort of become the main source of > conflict on earth.. > If someone wants to copy a real big amount of stuff from one node of a cluster to another (there can be tens or thousands of these nodes), the switch can connect these two nodes. All other transfers in the system can be going on without notice of this. To the extent other people want to deal with those two nodes, the switch can fairly divide down the bandwidth between those people. This will typically be a small fraction of the total capacity of the system or the network. Furthermore, on a typical large cluster, there will be a parallel filesystem with many independent block devices and very low latency switches. If I have 100 nodes all writing at once to 100 different block devices and there is a effectively a different wire from the node to the drive, then there is no contention.
If a hundred users all want to do this, with their respective entitlements, and from different nodes, then at some point you run out of gas. But a hundred users rarely if ever all want to do this. This is a pretty standard assumption of many kinds of telecommunication systems. So, neither wire networking nor bus use is usable for your analogy. The reason is that these resources can be managed by a secure executive process that divides up the work fairly. Systems that don't do this are non-critical systems. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
