[Beowulf] small-footprint MS WIn "MinWin"

[James Cownie]

On 22 Oct 2007, at 19:37, Robert G. Brown wrote:

>
> ...
> If we wanted to make a small compromise and perhaps manage a very few,
> very standard peripheral devices and maybe make it easier to run
> different programs, we might right the smallest possible operating
> system -- something capable of taking a portable binary that we  
> want to
> run and loading it onto the CPU to run, while providing it with some
> more or less fixed entry points into code for e.g. reading or writing
> disk, maybe a network device (trickier, because of the asynchronous
> problems there), and of course managing memory.  Let's name our  
> creation
> "DOS" just for grins.
> ...
> I'm just curious.  Who runs their cluster nodes at level 1 or 2 (plus
> networking as needed)?  Anybody?  Show of hands?

Seems to me that your "DOS" could equally be a description of SUNMOS  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUNMOS) and its descendants, which  
(AFAIK) are still in use at Sandia running significantly large  
clusters solving production problems.

Indeed Cray's Unicos/ic (the node os in the XT machines) describes in  
a similar way, and may even be the latest Sunmos descendant, if not  
it's certainly philosophically close.

So the answer to your question is likely "Quite a lot of people".  
(Or, maybe, a few people, but they have a *lot* with a lot of nodes :-))

--
-- Jim
--
James Cownie <jcownie at cantab.net>