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cmail@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> What is the difference between the Beowolf Project and the Virtual Server
> project?
>
In short, Beowulf is for parallel computing, Linux Virtual Server
is for scalable network services.
They are quite different now. However, I think they may be unified
under "single system image" some day. In the "single system image",
every node can see a single system image (the same memory space,
the same process space, the same external storage), and the
processes/threads can be transparently migrated to other nodes
in order to achieve load balance in the cluster. All the processes
are checkpointed, they can be restarted in the node or the others
if they fails, full fault tolerant can be made here. It will be
easy for programmers to code because of single space, they don't
need to statically partition jobs to different sites and let them
communicate through PVM or MPI. They just need identify the
parallelism of his scientific application, and fork the processes
or generate threads, because processes/threads will be automatically
load balanced on different nodes. For network services, the service
daemons just need to fork the processes or generates threads, it is
quite simple. I think it needs lots of investigation in how to
implement these mechanisms and make the overhead as low as possible.
What Linux Virtual Server has done is very simple, Single IP Address,
in which parallel services on different nodes is appeared as a
virtual service on a single IP address. The different nodes have
their own space, it is far from "single system image". It means
that we have a long way to run. :)
Thanks,
Wensong
> Is Beowolf better or worse?
> http://beowulf.gsfc.nasa.gov/
>
> Thanks.
> cmail@xxxxxxxxxx
>
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