available resource declaration language(s)

["David L. Nicol" <david@kasey.umkc.edu>]

Various resources that can be shared; some are architecture-dependent
(idle CPU) and some are independent (extra memory for network-speed 
swap device, available hard disk for balanced SAN) and some, such as
PVM-based distribution, are not commoditizable outside of their own terms.
(PVM requires the worker nodes have functioning C compilers, for compiling
the pieces that will run on themselves, once.)

Could the way the clustered machines find out about each other be
standardized?

Mosix uses a peer-to-peer architecture in which each node periodically
queries a peer selected at random from its list of peers; what archtectures
do other projects use?

Has anyone done any serious simulations of the efficiency of various discovery
methods? For instance, it is easy to imagine a virtual ring architecture in
which each node shares everything it knows about all other nodes in a larger
packet which is sent around the ring and a node can only initiate a resource
request when it has the token, for instance; or broadcast-based architectures
in which a node advertises its surplus resources with a periodic broadcast packet,
and nodes wishing to use the resource would begin a negotiation.

Thoughts?  Pointers to masters' theses?








-- 
                      David Nicol 816.235.1187 dnicol@cstp.umkc.edu
If God had meant us to compute securely, He'd have given
us more prime numbers! -- Casey Schaufler


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