Robert Luciani wrote:
*snip* (clustering discussion..)
Jokingly: I think the notion of functional individual computers
helping each other out sounds a bit like neourons in a brain. The
technological singularity is coming, nothing can stop it!
Oddly, they *are* - but not in the way theoreticians around the time
'Metropolis' or even 'Brave New World' were written might have enviaged, i.e.
neither centrally controlled nor even 'close coupled'.
The 'net, e-mail, file & media exchange, IRC... one could go on.. seem to JFDI
w/r all manner of pragmatic 'sharing' with one of the essential characteristics
of their human users:
- For the most part, a little 'latency' is not unwelcome.
IOW 'Mañana' - response / gratification in minutes, if not hours, is usually as
good as we could absorb anyway w/o becomeing totally 'time-slaved' to the
machinery that was intended to be servant - not master.
Specialized scientific applications are just that - specialized, and often
warranting from-the-ground-up bespoke software - OS included.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but most of these need a very different core
than (any of the) Unix anyway. Real-Time Exec's, self-onitoring,
soft-fault-tolerance, etc.
Bill
