Yes, granted, but they still share a single memory space (and IMHO are one parallell computer):
SGI Altix 3000 is recognized as the first Linux cluster that scales up to 64 processors within each node and the first cluster ever to allow global shared memory access across nodes.
In other words, 64 processors in each node (read box), but globally shared memory between all the nodes.
Sure, memory access won't be super fast across the borders (like maybe fibre channel network instead of direct optical connections between each pair of nodes), but it's the same sort of thing that happens inside each Altix. After all that's what the N in NUMA stands for! (NON uniform memory access)
My gut reaction is that this isn't a cluster. A cluster is a network of independent computers collaborating on delivering some service.
This is a parallell (super) computer. Key difference: all the processors share a single memory space with each other. Programs will run exactly as if this was a single (multitasking) computer.
Most clusters I've worked on are just a bunch of computers with a fast network, using various protocols to synchronize their behavior ("Hey, node 19 isn't pinging, he must have died. Wasn't he running Muckatron? Who takes that job? "Me!" Ok, Joe, start up Muckatron, it's your baby now...)
Also, does anyone know if anyone except SGI makes massively parallell unified memory computers anymore? Those Origins are some kick-ass machines...
Does anyone have a good link to some "official" definitions of cluster and parallell computer?
PS.
Kids today would probably call this a "massively" parallell computer. Hah! Back in my day, we used Connection Machines with 65536 1-bit processors! All the processors had to run the same program (synchronized cycle by cycle), though the data was different at each node. We had to program it in *Lisp, the sickest programming environment then invented, but we were happy with it! We wept for joy, every morning and sometimes at lunch!
I think this is the law he was refering to, check this part:
Retailers who intend to offer the public Wi-fi services must present the Communications Ministry with a request to that effect which gives rights to the retailer to set up the service
... and even ordinary consumers must get a "simple authorization" . IE, you must beg to the (corrupt, horrible even facist) government to be allowed to own a fucking AirPort base station. If you plan to share it (anyone "who intend to offer the public Wi-fi services") you must set up a contract with the fucking Communications Ministry (which is OWNED by triple-fucking Berlusconi, along with many TV channels and papers) with many cave-ats.
I believe the first one was the short novel "Player of Games"*, then he expanded on the universe in "Consider Phlebas"**.
That book is definitely his Magnum Opus. The scale of the book is immense, while still focusing on the fate of small individuals. A few words from the appendix:
Statistics Length of war: 48 years, one month. Total casualties, including machines, medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion. Losses: ships - 91,215,660; Orbitals: - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; Stars - 6.
The elder races rate this war as one of those singularily interesting Events that they see so rarely these days.
That's the kind of conflict we are following a handful of frail humans through. Overall, this book is on my top five list of books.
In the same universe: Use of Weapons*, Excession, Look to Windward.
Other SF: Feersum Endjinn*, Inversions, Against a Dark Background*
Non-SF: The Wasp Factory**, Walking on Glass*, The Bridge, Crow Road* (filmed for TV), A Song of Stone?, Canal Dreams?, Compilicty?, Espedair Street?, Whit?.
Interesting note: Somehow Iain Banks has managed to pull off something no author has done before: he is both a respected SF writer and a "respected author". High-brow magazines will analyze his latest main-stream novels and rate them highly, puzzling over connections to his earlier mainstream works, Jungian philosophy, 9/11 or whatever. They don't mention his SF career at all:-)
Interesting note two. I asked him myself, "How the hell do you pronounce that first name of yours?!". He said: "Eye-ee-eye-an", ie. pronounce every letter.
In the above '*' denotes "very very good'", '**' "Nobel Prize material", '?' haven't read.
How does that have anything to do with cutting edge technology?
I'd guess it's an attempt at satire, since the most intuitive and logical thing to do (yep, I got the file, now I can close the window), is also the most wrong thing you can do.
Its just the model under which the client was designed.
Yeah, it works for what it was designed to do, but it's awful as a general P2P system, which is what much of the SD crowd is elevating it to.... As you yourself say, it's worthless for anything but new files, essentialy a broadcast system. But it's really good at that!
What bugged was the part where they were setting up windmill powered electric heaters to warm up Mars.
Actually, there was a lot of sceptisism from the scientists about that little experiment in the book. It turned out that the reason Saxifrage Russell pushed that project so hard was that he had (unethically, without consent) hidden GM lichen inside the heaters, remember?
ESA and the russians aren't much competition right now... On the other hand neither is NASA, what with the Columbia debacle which will probably lead to a permanent moth-balling of the remaing orbiters.
The russians will just keep cranking out 1960's era craft until the factories break down. Nothing wrong with 60's rockets, but we need to have modern designs and materials if we're going to lower the cost of space access.
ESA is at least trying to develop new technology. Witness the Ariadne 5 a.k.a. "worlds most expensive fire cracker". Last thing I heard ESA needed 500.000.000 to redesign it from scratch. That kind of expense will cripple ESA for decades. *Sigh*. I guess I'll have to hold my thumbs for the Chinese.
This silly RFID thing undermines the one good reason I've heard why euros will beat dollars:
The largest euro bill is 500. The largest dollar bill is $100 (?). Therefore, you can fit five times as much unmarked, used cash in an anonymous breifcase if you use euros. Say about $5 million instead of $1 million.
This means that the nether world will convert to euros en masse for their shady, high value transactions. And, according to some sources, black transactions make up a full 50% by value of the world economy...
<nitpick>Actually, that would be a D Major 9th in the key of D (or A).
We still need to add D and A though... F# Major is closer as you only need to add A#.</nitpick>
Humour? What's that?:-)
Re:Something I don't understand
on
P2P Meets Push
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Eh? That's me. I published four movies and set them to repeat weekly (sort of a stress test...). What are you seing?
We already have 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 cent coins! Somebody needs to be shot for that. How about a system that aims to reduce the weight of my wallet? 5,10,50,100 seems pretty ideal.
So, retry the experiment using a single bacteria. Put it in a petri dish and wait until there are a few billion of them, then start the mouth wash treatment. You will get the same result.
It's more that C# includes a bunch of features that some java programmers had been asking for, and so does java 1.5.
... and the features would have been in Java 9.15 if it weren't for C#. There are certain nagging things about Java that developers have been complaining about since day one. The whole int/Integer thing is a biggie.
Sun has responded with "not a priority", "would require VM changes" (= "Evil, evil, evil, stupid!"). Then,.net/C# came along, implementing many of the things Java programmers complained about. Hey presto! Java got boxing. Hopefully we didn't lose to many developers in the meantime.
Auto-enumerating fors look very useful, and I think C# does not have them, ditto with the enums. Good work, Sun.
Still waiting for auto getters/setters/events/handlers a-la C#... Unless that's covered by the funky new '@' notation.
Also, JDO is certainly not slow. In fact, a good implementation with object caching and (if relational) prepared statement pooling and statement batching can be as fast or faster than straight JDBC.
Thank you ever so much for elaborating on a long standing joke of mine.
More than ten years ago I heard the first cries of "... given the complexity of current processors, modern C compilers outperform hand coded assembly in most cases.".
Then "... just-in-time compilation allows Java to be optimized further than statically compiled languages such as C".
(Missing link, anyone have a sound bite?) JDBC is faster than using SQL directly with the database.
A good object caching scheme (and statement pooling) will make JDO faster then JDBC.
So, my new JDO application is faster than a hand-coded assembler application! Yay! Only, why does it take 10 minutes to... <THUNK>
Thought Police! Circulate! There's nothing to see here!
Denmark are staunch supporters ot the USA. Most Americans seem unaware that Denmark was one of the very few countries that sent troops to Iraq. To aid the US in this desert war, they sent a submarine. It probably arrived just in time for the end of the war.
Still, I get your argument, and even agree with it. Reasonably soon, "engineer" type jobs could be automated. Soon after that (about 30 years from know if AI advances the way I think it will) science and leadership positions. In about 40-50 years, there will be NO JOBS AT ALL that can't be done better and cheaper by a machine. So, how do we respond as a society?
Keep the capitalistic way and allow the majority of people to starve and die in the street?
Institute Citizen Salary were any and all get a handsome weekly pay-check just for living?
I vote Citizen Salary. It's communistic, granted, but communism is the best fit in a society with unlimited wealth.
Re:Did you trace to that?
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Same here in Sweden, trace stop at Telia (Swedish ISP). Seems the packets get lost somewhere near the Telia / Sprint interface. My bet is on Sprint.
Re:PC-on-a-PCI-card for Macs
on
Virtual PC 6 Review
·
· Score: 2, Informative
PC prices are so cheap nowdays, that I'm wondering how come no company has come up with a "PC on a PCI card" which you can drop into a mac, and use as a normal PC instead of emulating it...
Like this (search for Houdini)? There were also (as you mention) the various Janus Bridgeboards for the Amigas. The fastest was a '486dx66, I think. There was even a A500 '286 card that connected to the memory expansion slot (!) at the bottom of the computer. With glorious Herkules graphics.
In other words, it has been tried. These card all had some things in common:
Being at least one processor generation behind the PC.
Costing about the same as an equivalent PC, despite being only glorified motherboards.
This concept could work, but only when there is a high volume PC motherboard form factor that's smaller than a PCI (or whatever we're using then) card. Then you can make a PCI-shaped 'glue' kit that plugs into the motherboards various connectors and fits into a PCI slot in another system.
Now, spin the ball, and cause the metal sheath to contract so that it grips the ball. Quite like the clutch of a car engaging. Immediately, angular momentum is transferred from the ball to the sheath, until the ball and sheath are now rotating at the same rate.
You keep making this 'point' in this thread. I'm still not getting it, though. In this example, the shell (the atmosphere) was static before contact. Last time I looked, the atmosphere was (mostly) following the rotation of the Earth.
Even allowing this point, static air molecules hit the revolving ground, bounce of at a tangent, absorbing rotational momentum... *But* unless the molecules are launched at escape velocity, they will eventually fall back down, hit the earth and transfer the energy right back. The whole process is very reversible.
Heat is random movement of molecules. Please explain in greater depth how non-random, eastern movement of 'bounced' air molecules turns into random heat-like movement of air molecules.
Oh, and "Heat radiation carries angular momentum"?! Does the photons have extra spin or what the hell are you getting at??
My design involved powering up a very powerful electromagnet while on one of the magnetic poles. The only problem is that he ship tends to flip over and plummet to the ground.
It turned out most of the dot-coms had already patented that.
No company would ever put it in writing that its ok to cut their hardware in half with a hacksaw.
Really? Some years ago I bought a CyberVision graphics card for my Amiga. That board was designed to run in any big box Amiga (2/3/4000). Unfortunately, the A2000 has somewhat different physical dimensions around the graphics slot, so the card just won't fit. Solution? Quoth the manual:
A2000 installation instructions: using an appropriate saw, sever the Zorro connector from the board along the dotted lines. Use the supplied flat cable in sockets X and Y to connect the two halves.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, granted, but they still share a single memory space (and IMHO are one parallell computer):
In other words, 64 processors in each node (read box), but globally shared memory between all the nodes.
Sure, memory access won't be super fast across the borders (like maybe fibre channel network instead of direct optical connections between each pair of nodes), but it's the same sort of thing that happens inside each Altix. After all that's what the N in NUMA stands for! (NON uniform memory access)
My gut reaction is that this isn't a cluster. A cluster is a network of independent computers collaborating on delivering some service.
This is a parallell (super) computer. Key difference: all the processors share a single memory space with each other. Programs will run exactly as if this was a single (multitasking) computer.
Most clusters I've worked on are just a bunch of computers with a fast network, using various protocols to synchronize their behavior ("Hey, node 19 isn't pinging, he must have died. Wasn't he running Muckatron? Who takes that job? "Me!" Ok, Joe, start up Muckatron, it's your baby now...)
Also, does anyone know if anyone except SGI makes massively parallell unified memory computers anymore? Those Origins are some kick-ass machines...
Does anyone have a good link to some "official" definitions of cluster and parallell computer?
PS.
Kids today would probably call this a "massively" parallell computer. Hah! Back in my day, we used Connection Machines with 65536 1-bit processors! All the processors had to run the same program (synchronized cycle by cycle), though the data was different at each node. We had to program it in *Lisp, the sickest programming environment then invented, but we were happy with it! We wept for joy, every morning and sometimes at lunch!
I think this is the law he was refering to, check this part:
Retailers who intend to offer the public Wi-fi services must present the Communications Ministry with a request to that effect which gives rights to the retailer to set up the service
... and even ordinary consumers must get a "simple authorization" . IE, you must beg to the (corrupt, horrible even facist) government to be allowed to own a fucking AirPort base station. If you plan to share it (anyone "who intend to offer the public Wi-fi services") you must set up a contract with the fucking Communications Ministry (which is OWNED by triple-fucking Berlusconi, along with many TV channels and papers) with many cave-ats.
Yeah, that sounds <sarcasm>great</sarcasm>
I believe the first one was the short novel "Player of Games"*, then he expanded on the universe in "Consider Phlebas"**.
That book is definitely his Magnum Opus. The scale of the book is immense, while still focusing on the fate of small individuals. A few words from the appendix:
Statistics
Length of war: 48 years, one month. Total casualties, including machines, medjel and non-combatants: 851.4 billion. Losses: ships - 91,215,660; Orbitals: - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1; Spheres - 3; Stars - 6.
The elder races rate this war as one of those singularily interesting Events that they see so rarely these days.
That's the kind of conflict we are following a handful of frail humans through. Overall, this book is on my top five list of books.
In the same universe: Use of Weapons*, Excession, Look to Windward.
Other SF: Feersum Endjinn*, Inversions, Against a Dark Background*
Non-SF: The Wasp Factory**, Walking on Glass*, The Bridge, Crow Road* (filmed for TV), A Song of Stone?, Canal Dreams?, Compilicty?, Espedair Street?, Whit?.
Interesting note: Somehow Iain Banks has managed to pull off something no author has done before: he is both a respected SF writer and a "respected author". High-brow magazines will analyze his latest main-stream novels and rate them highly, puzzling over connections to his earlier mainstream works, Jungian philosophy, 9/11 or whatever. They don't mention his SF career at all :-)
Interesting note two. I asked him myself, "How the hell do you pronounce that first name of yours?!". He said: "Eye-ee-eye-an", ie. pronounce every letter.
In the above '*' denotes "very very good'", '**' "Nobel Prize material", '?' haven't read.
I'd guess it's an attempt at satire, since the most intuitive and logical thing to do (yep, I got the file, now I can close the window), is also the most wrong thing you can do.
Yeah, it works for what it was designed to do, but it's awful as a general P2P system, which is what much of the SD crowd is elevating it to.... As you yourself say, it's worthless for anything but new files, essentialy a broadcast system. But it's really good at that!
McBribe?
Yo, greasy-haired-man, here's two buck for you, FOR YOU man, howsabout "losing" me a BigMac&Co? Yeah? Ran off, didn't pay, maybe? Yeah?
That's a McBribe!
Actually, there was a lot of sceptisism from the scientists about that little experiment in the book. It turned out that the reason Saxifrage Russell pushed that project so hard was that he had (unethically, without consent) hidden GM lichen inside the heaters, remember?
<mood type="foul">
ESA and the russians aren't much competition right now... On the other hand neither is NASA, what with the Columbia debacle which will probably lead to a permanent moth-balling of the remaing orbiters.
The russians will just keep cranking out 1960's era craft until the factories break down. Nothing wrong with 60's rockets, but we need to have modern designs and materials if we're going to lower the cost of space access.
ESA is at least trying to develop new technology. Witness the Ariadne 5 a.k.a. "worlds most expensive fire cracker". Last thing I heard ESA needed 500.000.000 to redesign it from scratch. That kind of expense will cripple ESA for decades. *Sigh*. I guess I'll have to hold my thumbs for the Chinese.
</mood>
OT: Actual shell experience (UnixWare)
Indeed.
This silly RFID thing undermines the one good reason I've heard why euros will beat dollars:
The largest euro bill is 500. The largest dollar bill is $100 (?). Therefore, you can fit five times as much unmarked, used cash in an anonymous breifcase if you use euros. Say about $5 million instead of $1 million.
This means that the nether world will convert to euros en masse for their shady, high value transactions. And, according to some sources, black transactions make up a full 50% by value of the world economy...
<nitpick>Actually, that would be a D Major 9th in the key of D (or A). We still need to add D and A though... F# Major is closer as you only need to add A#.</nitpick>
Humour? What's that? :-)
Eh? That's me. I published four movies and set them to repeat weekly (sort of a stress test...). What are you seing?
How about this:
Yay!
Dear god, NO!
We already have 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 cent coins! Somebody needs to be shot for that. How about a system that aims to reduce the weight of my wallet? 5,10,50,100 seems pretty ideal.
So, retry the experiment using a single bacteria. Put it in a petri dish and wait until there are a few billion of them, then start the mouth wash treatment. You will get the same result.
Autoboxing. RTFA.
Generics. RTFA.
Regexp. RTF last year's A. (Though regexps really could have been implmented in a better way.)
... and the features would have been in Java 9.15 if it weren't for C#. There are certain nagging things about Java that developers have been complaining about since day one. The whole int/Integer thing is a biggie.
Sun has responded with "not a priority", "would require VM changes" (= "Evil, evil, evil, stupid!"). Then, .net/C# came along, implementing many of the things Java programmers complained about. Hey presto! Java got boxing. Hopefully we didn't lose to many developers in the meantime.
Auto-enumerating fors look very useful, and I think C# does not have them, ditto with the enums. Good work, Sun.
Still waiting for auto getters/setters/events/handlers a-la C#... Unless that's covered by the funky new '@' notation.
Thank you ever so much for elaborating on a long standing joke of mine.
More than ten years ago I heard the first cries of "... given the complexity of current processors, modern C compilers outperform hand coded assembly in most cases.".
Then "... just-in-time compilation allows Java to be optimized further than statically compiled languages such as C".
(Missing link, anyone have a sound bite?) JDBC is faster than using SQL directly with the database.
A good object caching scheme (and statement pooling) will make JDO faster then JDBC.
So, my new JDO application is faster than a hand-coded assembler application! Yay! Only, why does it take 10 minutes to... <THUNK>
Thought Police! Circulate! There's nothing to see here!
Denmark are staunch supporters ot the USA. Most Americans seem unaware that Denmark was one of the very few countries that sent troops to Iraq. To aid the US in this desert war, they sent a submarine. It probably arrived just in time for the end of the war.
My, you're pumped to the gills with pure gall...
Still, I get your argument, and even agree with it. Reasonably soon, "engineer" type jobs could be automated. Soon after that (about 30 years from know if AI advances the way I think it will) science and leadership positions. In about 40-50 years, there will be NO JOBS AT ALL that can't be done better and cheaper by a machine. So, how do we respond as a society?
I vote Citizen Salary. It's communistic, granted, but communism is the best fit in a society with unlimited wealth.
Same here in Sweden, trace stop at Telia (Swedish ISP). Seems the packets get lost somewhere near the Telia / Sprint interface. My bet is on Sprint.
Like this (search for Houdini)? There were also (as you mention) the various Janus Bridgeboards for the Amigas. The fastest was a '486dx66, I think. There was even a A500 '286 card that connected to the memory expansion slot (!) at the bottom of the computer. With glorious Herkules graphics.
In other words, it has been tried. These card all had some things in common:
This concept could work, but only when there is a high volume PC motherboard form factor that's smaller than a PCI (or whatever we're using then) card. Then you can make a PCI-shaped 'glue' kit that plugs into the motherboards various connectors and fits into a PCI slot in another system.
You keep making this 'point' in this thread. I'm still not getting it, though. In this example, the shell (the atmosphere) was static before contact. Last time I looked, the atmosphere was (mostly) following the rotation of the Earth.
Even allowing this point, static air molecules hit the revolving ground, bounce of at a tangent, absorbing rotational momentum... *But* unless the molecules are launched at escape velocity, they will eventually fall back down, hit the earth and transfer the energy right back. The whole process is very reversible.
Heat is random movement of molecules. Please explain in greater depth how non-random, eastern movement of 'bounced' air molecules turns into random heat-like movement of air molecules.
Oh, and "Heat radiation carries angular momentum"?! Does the photons have extra spin or what the hell are you getting at??
My design involved powering up a very powerful electromagnet while on one of the magnetic poles. The only problem is that he ship tends to flip over and plummet to the ground.
It turned out most of the dot-coms had already patented that.
No company would ever put it in writing that its ok to cut their hardware in half with a hacksaw.
Really? Some years ago I bought a CyberVision graphics card for my Amiga. That board was designed to run in any big box Amiga (2/3/4000). Unfortunately, the A2000 has somewhat different physical dimensions around the graphics slot, so the card just won't fit. Solution? Quoth the manual:
A2000 installation instructions: using an appropriate saw, sever the Zorro connector from the board along the dotted lines. Use the supplied flat cable in sockets X and Y to connect the two halves.
I kid you not! Right there in the manual!
Well, you can search. And files won't disappear from the network unless reuploaded every day.
Unfortunately, it lacks the real killer feature of FreeNet: routing the actual data through the P2P network just like the queries.
This means the Man can still get you by setting up honeypots. What use is a secure channel if your peer is malicious?