On Fri, 1 Sep 2006 09:45:32 -0700 (PDT)
Matthew Dillon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> :On Thu, Aug 31, 2006 at 09:58:59AM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> :: that 75% of the interest in our project has nothing to do with my
> :: project goals but instead are directly associated with work being
> done :: by our relatively small community. I truely appreciate that
> effort :: because it allows me to focus on the part that is most near
> and dear :: to my own heart.
> :
> :Big question: after all the work that will go into the clustering, other
> than :scientific research, what will the average user be able to use such
> advanced :capability for?
> :
> :Jonathon McKitrick
>
> I held off answering because I became quite interested in what others
> thought the clustering would be used for.
>
> Lets take a big, big step back and look at what the clustering means
> from a practical standpoint.
>
> There are really two situations involved here. First, we certainly
> can allow you to say 'hey, I am going to take down machine A for
> maintainance', giving the kernel the time to migrate all
> resources off of machine A.
>
> But being able to flip the power switch on machine A without warning,
> or otherwise have a machine fail unexpectedly, is another ball of wax
> entirely. There are only a few ways to cope with such an event:
>
> (1) Processes with inaccessible data are killed. High level programs
> such as 'make' would have to be made aware of this possibility,
> process the correct error code, and restart the killed children
> (e.g. compiles and such).
>
> In this scenario, only a few programs would have to be made aware
> of this type of failure in order to reap large benefits from a
> big cluster, such as the ability to do massively parallel
> compiles or graphics or other restartable things.
This is also quite good enough from my point of view, I think my
post may have given the impression that I was expecting #3 to appear - I
certainly was not, I know how hard that is. In fact #1 is more than I was
hoping for, having the make fail and a few windows close but being able to
reopen them and restart the make by hand would be orders of magnitude
better than I can achieve now with periodic rsync and a fair amount of
fiddling around to get environments running on a backup machine when I have
a hardware failure.
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