[Beowulf] [tt] One million ARM chips challenge Intel bumblebee

[Douglas Eadline]

>> > It's all about ultimate scalability.  Anybody with a moderate
>> competence (certainly anyone on this
>> list) could devise a scheme to use 1000 perfect processors that never
>> fail to do 1000 quanta of work
>> in unit time.  It's substantially more challenging to devise a scheme to
>> do 1000 quanta of work in
>> unit time on, say, 1500 processors with a 20% failure rate.  Or even in
>> 1.2*unit time.
>> >
>>
>> Just to be clear - I wasn't saying this was a bad idea. Scaling up to
>> this size seems inevitable. I was just imagining the team of admins who
>> would have to be working non-stop to replace dead processors!
>>
>> I wonder what the architecture for this system will be like. I imagine
>> it will be built around small multi-socket blades that are hot-swappable
>> to handle this.
>
>
>
> I think that you just anticipate the failures and deal with them.  It's
> challenging to write code to do this, but it's certainly a worthy
> objective. I can easily see a situation where the cost to replace dead
> units is so high that you just don't bother doing it: it's cheaper to just
> add more live ones to the "pool".

I wrote about the programming issue in a series of three articles
(conjecture, never really tried it, if only I had the time ...).
The first article links (at the end) to the other two.

  http://www.clustermonkey.net//content/view/158/28/

And yes, disposable "nodes" just like a failed cable in a large
cluster, route a new one, don't worry about unbundling
a huge cable tree. I assume there will be a high level of
integration  so there may be "nodes" are left for dead which
are integrated into a much larger blade.

--
Doug

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--
Doug

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