Gavin Maltby wrote:
On 08/25/05 17:34, Felix Schulte wrote:
8 SF15k running *one* OS instance?
I don't think so, I think it is some form of compute cluster.
The Sun Fire-Link had a high bandwidth, super low latency interconnect
and then through Sun Cluster you had the Remote Shared Memory APIs
(a.k.a. RSM). I recall from reading the cluster whitepaper at the time,
there was also something called xdoors for fast IPC between nodes.
Sun Cluster also brought global device trees (kinda) and global
filesystems, so while you weren't one OS instance, you had a set of
really interesting APIs you could do some serious damage with using Sun
Fire-Link. Cluster also supported the same APIs over cheaper interconnects.
Sadly, I think the only major use by a complicated commercial program
was Oracle in 9i RAC (they called it "cache fusion", but a search for
that makes it seem like a retread term-- there was a whitepaper
somewhere once), and they eschewed that in favor of a more
cross-platform (and a more pure Oracle software) approach. Now they are
their own volume manager, etc.
It always looked like neat stuff. To get 8 boxes linked, you'd have to
buy the Sun Fire-Link switch.
There are other hardware goodies that end up never really being
productized (at least for the general public, and maybe not at all as
far as I know of).
- Matt
--
Matt Ingenthron - Technical Specialist, Web Services
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Client Solutions
http://blogs.sun.com/mingenthron/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 310-242-6439
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