On Sat, 26 Jun 2010, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > Apparently, physicalization is the reverse of virtualization. The use of > hundreds of low-power (like atom, arm, etc) processors each running its own > OS, instead of a smaller number of higher-power (like xeon, etc) processors > ... To build-out highly parallelized servers, for the purpose of either > eliminating the need for virtualization, or to run highly parallelized and > distributed work loads supposedly cheaper and less power hungry than the > equivalent high-power "standard" server solution...
Hi Edward. Within HPC it's been standard for many years to run a large number of relatively cheap boxes to processes highly parallelizable workloads. A lot of sites will use nothing more than racks and racks of cheap dell servers. Each might have 4GB ram and 4 cores and away you go. Plenty of OSS is available to manage compute clusters like this. Eg Torque and Maui. Virtualisation doesn't normally come in to this sort of processing as it increases overhead and often doesn't offer much in a situation like this. As always there are exceptions. Cheers, Rob -- Email: [email protected] Linux counter ID #16440 IRC: Solver (OFTC & Freenode) Web: http://www.practicalsysadmin.com Open Source: The revolution that silently changed the world _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
