[Beowulf] OSDL Clusters SIG

[Ariel Sabiguero]

OSDL were some of the bigger sponsors of kernel 2.6.
They pushed several "required" changes for carrier grade environments, 
like J. Layton mentions.
They have also been working adding NUMA functionality, processor 
hotplugging and really interesting figures that allowed SGI (and others) 
to move to Linux, and also to move Linux to other areas. Their work made 
linux mature enough to be considered for high demanding bussines.... in 
the end, making COTS stronger and giving us better performance and HW.

As it was mentioned before, in the list: "Beowulf is about performance, 
not reliability", but redesigns in 2.6 kernel increased latency (and 
reduced jitter) in ethernet TCP/IP communications.
That is one of the first things that comes to my mind...
Also, to avoid netfilter complexity might reduce latency, as QoS & 
Firewalling is only overhead for Beowulf private networks. It might be 
worth for performance to "unload" netfilter complexity...
At least these are some things that I can think now to "suggest" to OSDL.
I know that it might seem quite crazy to plug/unplug netfilter. This 
might avoid the movement towards raw-ethernet (even though we cannot 
avoid CRC calculation [unless we can disable it!{other suggestion?}]) so 
as to minimize latency.

Sorry for the disorder in the ideas, it resembles my mind.

Ariel

Joel Krauska escribió:

> Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:
>
>> I quick glance at the website leads me to believe it's more
>> of an HA cluster group than an HPC group. Some of the
>> documents are about Carrier Grade Linux.
>
>
> That's mostly true, but I would say that there's some worthwhile 
> overlap.  One of the projects supposedly involved is OpenSSI.org, 
> who's work has some similarities to Beowulf capabilities.
>
> --joel
>
> _______________________________________________
> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit 
> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
>