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Ask Donald Becker

Posted by Roblimo on from the linux-luminaries dept.

This is a "needs no introduction" introduction, because Donald Becker is one of the people who has been most influential in making GNU/Linux a usable operating system, and is also one of the "fathers" of Beowulf and commodity supercomputing clusters in general. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply, plus a special one for this interview only: "What if we made a Beowulf cluster of these?" is not an appropriate question.

5 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Re:One question... by kiolbasa · · Score: 4, Informative

    If I recall, the definition of a Beowulf cluster does not specify Linux specifically, only a free operating system.

    Look it up

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    Beer wants to be free
  2. Re:One question... by The+Turd+Report · · Score: 3, Informative

    But, there have been beowulf clusters made out of Windows boxes.

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    Michael Loves Me!
  3. Re:Message Passing vs. Single System Image by fgodfrey · · Score: 3, Informative
    These two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. The Cray T3E is a single system image machine, but applications running on it are almost exclusively message passing in nature. My opinion on why there aren't proliferations of SSI clusters is because they are a lot harder to build. If you go with a set of seperate machines, which means you don't have a single *memory* image, getting the various kernels involved to all talk to each other is non-trivial. If you go with a single memory image, then you're not really doing a cluster, you are building a real supercomputer. Examples of single memory image machines of large size include the Sun Enterprise 1x000 line, the SGI Origin 2000/3000 series, the Cray T3E, and the not-quite-in-full-production-yet Cray X1.


    As for the 32 bit address limit, it's already a problem. For large scientific code, 4GB per processor is already not enough. Now, people live with it, but that doesn't mean they like it. Intel's 36-bit addressing hack doesn't help, either, since you still have a single-virtual-address space limitation of 32 bits. This is probably the biggest motivation to go to a 64 bit architecture. Note that this problem also applies to large databases.

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    Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
  4. Re:One question... by bhsx · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, there have been high-performance, super-computing clusters built on Windows OSs (w2k, iirc). You can be quite sure that M$ doesn't call them Beowulf.

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    put the what in the where?
  5. Re:Which Network gear manufacturer? by 0x0d0a · · Score: 3, Informative

    I like Becker's drivers, but I ran into a problem with his Tulip ones -- on a *massively* overloaded Ethernet, if you get 16 retransmits failing and so the transmit fails, the driver does a full reset of the card. This makes the card not send data for about two seconds, which means on an extremely overloaded Ethernet, the card isn't that useful.

    Right now, I'm using a 3c905b card (though it isn't a Becker project) with great success.

    I think Linus likes eepro cards, IIRC from lkml.

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    May we never see th