Re: cluster list

["Albert D. Cahalan" <acahalan@cs.uml.edu>]

J . A . Magallon writes:

> First of all, I have to say that I do not know too much about kernel
> internals. [...] My main insterest is in getting a cluster built with
> low end boxes (low end relative to multiprocessing boxes, some 2-way
> pc boards) linked with 100Mb ether and its own switch.

In that case, you have everything you need and no reason to even
pay attention to this list. The existing stuff works fine.

> As everybody says, all that can be done in user space should be
> done that way.

You can do TCP/IP in userspace. You should not!

> It would be fine to have something like
> /cluster/node/0/ip
>                 mem
>                 bogomips
> /cluster/node/1/ip
> ..
> /cluster/node/self -> 1
> ..

If you share the PID space, you can put it all in /proc instead.
Having /proc/cluster/$NODE would be bad, but it is great if everything
can sanely fit into the existing /proc.

> And think about nodes in cluster being even diskless. My ideal
> cluster will be a root NFS server and nodes booting over ethernet,

Mine:

Each node consists of a CPU, local RAM, optional flash ROM, L3 cache,
and a multi-purpose chip that does DMA between nodes. There isn't any
expansion opportunity on the node, or even a PCI chip.

So stop assuming clusters have network cards! If I had one, it would
be an add-on device accesed via a dumb (non-CPU) bridge node. There
are some problems here too... which node(s) control(s) the device?
Can (should) node 42 tell the device to use data in node 33?

Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-cluster/