HD cloning

John Marquart jomarqua at indiana.edu
Tue Dec 5 09:12:58 PST 2000


I may be out of place saying this, and I by no means intend to start any
sort of flame war,

BUT, I feel that you have done Robert Brown a great disservice in your
attack below.  He has been a consistent and excellent contributer to this
forum, and I doubt he intended any "supercomputer elitism."  He is far
more likely to abhor such elitism.

I believe the intent of his statement, is that beowulfs focus on
computational performance - rather then high-availability.  (That is not
to say that the two focal areas do not over-lap.)  IIRC, RB has even
championed the single-image cluster at various points in time.

His comment does not slight data and web server clusters - just points out
a different focus.  Most beowulfs, due to budget constraints, etc., do not
provide for redundant power, high perf. RAID arrays, etc. that would
typically be desirable for production data/web serving clusters.

-john marquart


On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, Bruce Janson wrote:
> And to you Robert Brown: speak for yourself please when you say
> (in your message of Sun, 3 Dec 2000 16:03:39 -0500 (EST)):
>
> 	A beowulf is a high performance computing
> 	cluster, not a data or web server cluster.
>
> This kind of supercomputer elitism, this fascination with fine-
> grained parallelism and linear speed-up has held back the progress
> of single system image multicomputing for long enough.  I disagree
> with your claim, so much so that I wouldn't even fight for your
> right to make it (well, not with much conviction).


John "Jamie" Marquart		|     This message posted 100% MS free.
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