Re: ssi on podcast

Brock,

If we may be honest about SSI in general:

For my 8 node $200 a box cluster having a SSI would be really GREAT.
And i can't use big enough capital letters for it.

For HPC with big supercomputers it's total nonsense to do things in a  
semi-centralized manner.

Yet where it is interesting to make 1 big supercomputer out of my  
$3200 set of 8 machines
which eat together by the way around 1.4 kilowatt under full load, so  
that's similar to a
8 socket machine of $200k.

Now latest 8 socket machines sure are faster than this 64 cores i  
have here,
yet realize the price i paid for them.

So it would be as powerful nearly as a 8 socket machine
given the right software and decent interconnects.

So you want the choice of which interconnect to use, to take that  
yourself.

Let me assure you that built in ethernet cards are not useful to  
combine into a chessmachine. The latency
is too bad of the cheap ethernet cards (sure solarlare at $1000 a  
card will work, but that's my point exactly).

So where the price of the network is already a problem, you sure  
don't want to pay big bucks for the software.

So software that makes 1 SSI out of it, that IS interesting, provided  
it is cheap. Anything that's $xxx a port is
nonsense to use. In fact even $xx a node already is nonsense  
considering that infiniband software is for free
and also networks from the past usually, not all of them, spreaded  
the software for free.

A great latency interconnect was for example Quadrics. I still have  
an old network here. Bandwidth is a joke of it
compared to todays pci-e cards, but latency still is beating the  
fastest and most expensive TCP solution on the planet.
Software was for free downloadable. I still have that here somewhere.

OpenSSI was for free, that is what is good of it. Yet look what  
distro's it used to work for. Same with OpenMosix.
They never really were compatible with HPC networks that usually work  
at different distro's with different kernel requirements.

Fixing that costs money. Open source software is great, yet usually  
it's paid persons who maintain / carry it out.
Someone needs to pay that maintenance bill. I'm not, and as it  
appears no one is willing to do that.

Yet where having a small SSI using free software, the promise that  
OpenSSI delivered, it appears to be
the pipedream that never matured. It appears no one is prepared to  
fund some people to build this.

Now that's sad, but it's the reality of the market simply.

Let's just move on instead of giving attention to the few who still  
try to make big bucks based upon something that's
easy to program for and with, yet which simply always was too expensive.

Price matters.






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