[geeks] Re: Super Sun3

[geeks at sunhelp.org]

I've run a mosix cluster, and it deals ok, however it's not perfect, and
it gets weird sometimes....
	Nick

On Thu, 17 May 2001, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:

> On Thu, 17 May 2001, Michael Thompson wrote:
> 
> > >I was surfing ebay, and I saw this Dual MC68040 VME Single Board Computers
> > >(http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1236413911).
> > >
> > >The following occured to me.  Many Sun3 owners run NetBSD, OpenBSD, or
> > >linux instead of SunOS.  So, one could take 4 or these boards, cram them
> > >into a Sun3/160 chassis, and run linux SMP with Mosix patch on them.
> > >Thus, making a Super Sun3. 
> > <snip>
> > 
> > VMEbus doesn't support cache coherency so SMP across the backplane won't
> > work. There are other possibilities though. You could run SMP on each board
> > and then cluster the boards with Beowulf software. You could get 42 CPUs in
> > a 19" rack using commercial 21 slot VMEbus subracks. You could also use
> > BusNet to run TCP/IP across the VMEbus backplane and get about 20 MB/s
> > between boards.
> 
> I was assuming that the caches wouldn't be coherent over the bus.  That's
> why I mentioned Mosix.  Mosix takes several machines on a network and
> treats them as one.  So, if I have 4 dual processor machines with 256s
> megs of ram, the mosix will let me write programs as if they are running
> on a single 8 processor machine with a gig of ram.  This is a great way to
> build linux supercomputers.  I don't know how well it deals with
> optimizing memory locations to minimize memory access latencies, but it is
> still cool none the less.
> 
> --
> Joshua Boyd
> 
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