[Beowulf] High Performance for Large Database

[hanzl at noel.feld.cvut.cz]

Hello RGB,

I had no intention to take up your whole morning :-) (Neither did I
intend to exploit your susceptibility to DoS attack by making
provocative comments :-)) )

Of course, I agree with your explanation about databases. However,

> MOST of the energy of this list is devoted to HPC -- numerical
> computations and applications.
> ...
> Nevertheless, databases per se are not numerical HPC, and a cluster
> built to do SQL transactions on a collective shared database is not
> properly called a "beowulf"

yes, but I still have a feeling that you are trying to squeeze
_numerical_ to definition of beowulf which would be a pity because
there are problems with _numerical/symbolic_ mix best solved on
exactly the same type of hardware as the _numerical_ ones. I hope
these can live on this list as well, unless cooling the FPU portion of
the chip bacames the main topic here :-))

OK, I do confess that I do pursue my selfish goals because my problems
are numerical/symbolic mix :-) And no, I do not use SQL databases for
them. However I know people who do misuse SQL databases this way (in
the similar manner we lazy people waste computer power with perl or
Matlab) and who could make easy progress by MPI implementing very very
limited subset of SQL, just enough to run those stupid select()s found
in their code.

But I repeat, normal SQL databases are mostly out of topic here, no
doubt.

Best Regards

Vaclav Hanzl