One-Machine Linux Cluster 260
An AC wrote: Forget Beowulf ? clusters, Jacques Gelinas has made available a kernel patch to enable many virtual servers running on the same machine, even the same kernel. Read his original message posted to the Linux kernel list." Imagine what this will mean for hosting companies...
Everyone gets their own psuedo server (Score:4, Insightful)
*BSD Jail? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*BSD Jail? (Score:2, Informative)
the FAQ entry [solucorp.qc.ca]
here
Re:*BSD Jail? (Score:2, Interesting)
See jailNG [watson.org]
wat r the implications for mainframes? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:wat r the implications for mainframes? (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably not, but you _will_ assuredly see a commodity item with a z900's IO in your lifetime (assuming you're of average
I can hear the trolls now... (Score:1)
On a more serious note, though, this still does not give you the advantages a dedicated server does. You do not have the dedicated *hardware* resources and it is likely much slower than just going the "chroot route" (due to all of these virtual machines on one server...)
Very Useful (Score:5, Insightful)
The patcher is right...modern CPUs (for my industry) have PLENTY of power. What I hate is having to run some third party app for a client (even in a Linux environment) that *might* affect the whole machine. This patch holds the promise that I won't have as much to worry about.
Yes, this is a good thing.
Re:Very Useful (Score:2, Informative)
If this is your problem you're not running the right apps. For modern production machines the problem is usually running Exchange/Sendmail instead of Qmail or MSDNS instead of DJBDNS (OK, maybe i'm partial to DJ Bernstein's apps). The only thing you might overload on is web servers, and if you're running Apache you've got such good code behind you that your CPU is probably the bottleneck.
The answer for production servers is not "seperation between clients" but rather choosing apps which are efficient. Name any app likely to be run on a high traffic machine and I can give you a specific UN*X app which will do it with very little waste.
Re:Very Useful (Score:2)
Limit all clients to a max 10% CPU and 10% of the ram (depending on configuration). Most are manageable like this -- and nobody notices when someone has a script with a tiny loop that just pulls cpu time till it dies
Re:Very Useful (Score:2)
you can easily run 12 websites on a SMP P-III 866 and if each boots off of seperate partitions (or even seperate SCSI drives for more seperation!) that would rock.
The only problem I see is that User C can rob processor time from Users A and B by simply recompiling the Kernel with a make -J2
I wonder what plans are in the future to eliminate machine A from mounting Machine B's hard drive partitions or Sniffing the ethernet traffic or even dumping the contents of memory.
Re:Very Useful (Score:2)
Currently, the only choices we have are colocation and virtual web server hosting. colocation is way too expensive, and virtual hosting does not offer enough flexibility. It's hard to get any services that are not offered as part of the hosting company's smorgasboard.
Virtual hosts like this would be perfect for tinkerers who can build all the stuff by themselves, without having to fork out for a rackmount server, precious rack space, and expensive colo fees.
Re:Very Useful (Score:2)
Re:Very Useful - is it? (Score:2)
Well, for those kinds of scenarios we could use a method frequently used by a renowned professional commercial platform. Just hunt down an MCSE, and tell them to fix the problem. I assure you, it will take only a few seconds.
don't forget user mode linux (Score:1, Informative)
Basically Like OpenVMS' Galaxy? (Score:4, Informative)
Finally catching up (Score:1, Flamebait)
Take a look at the jail(8) [freebsd.org] and jail(2) [freebsd.org] manapges.
Re:Finally catching up (Score:3, Insightful)
Jail isn't the same as this. If you read the jail manpages, it gives lots of examples how running with a jail involves very interesting problems for some uses. This different technique has different problems for other uses, and does some things nicely that jail does not. And user mode Linux is different, and better for yet other purposes.
Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:4, Interesting)
The devil will be in how you refresh test and dev from production, but that can probably be done inside Logical Volume Manager.
This is very very cool stuff it will be very ineresting to see how it stacks up against the big boys in Virtual machine space.
Re:Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:2, Informative)
The way most E10/15 installations are used is to split the chassis, which supplies redundant power, management bus (JTAG) and a centreplane configuration for data and address buses, among several system boards. Each combination of system boards is used to run a completely separate OS installation. Even the data and address busses are physically separated from each other, rather than logically as in the article or an S390. It is a very rare error that will take the entire chassis down, providing superior uptimes. For the article, if there was a data or address bus error for one virtual machine, all of them would be affected, since it's the same physical hardware. This is not the case for an E10/15k.
You could, theoretically, split one chassis into lots of system boards and run lots of Solaris instances in a cluster, but that wouldn't be nearly as powerful as putting all the boards into a dirty big SMP Solaris instance. Solaris SMP is pretty darn cool, IMHO.
Re:Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:4, Interesting)
What you're suggesting is pretty much the opposite of how this package works. As the author himself states, you cannot dedicate hardware resources to a vserver. Only one kernel is ever running, and you use all of your cpus or none. Process- and user-space isolation is provided, but if a process in one vserver tickles a kernel bug that crashes the system, the whole ball of wax will come down with that vserver. (Likewise, it's very likely that a kernel-level root exploit will allow you to break out of the vserver and attack the whole system.)
Essentially, vserver is to the process space what chroot is to the filesystem layer.
This is not inherantly better or worse than the "system partitioning" approach; it's just a different approach, and will have different uses.
Hardware isolation (Score:3, Informative)
In Solaris, there are the psr* family of commands for processor administration. psradmin -f 0 will turn off processor 0. As long as this isn't physical powering down of processors, and simply instructions to the scheduler to disregard p0, you could, on the above vm, do something like:
Prod: psradm -f 4,5,6,7
Test: psradm -f 0,1,2,3,6,7
Dev: psradm -f 0,1,2,3,4,5
Leaving procs 0-3 for Prod, 4-5 for Test, and 6-7 for Dev.
Along the same lines, at boot time you can explicitly state memory ranges to the kernel, if linux can't detect your memory right, or you have known bad memory you want to avoid. With the same thought, the Prod, Test, and Dev kernels can be brought up explicitly stating the 0-2G, 2-3G, and 3-4G ranges as usable memory addresses.
You run into more problems when it comes to peripherals in the box, but how many serial ports do you really need? Just specify ttyS0 in the VM with the addresses of ttyS0,1,2 of the physical server.
Am I smoking crack, or should I just stick with my much-more-hardware-flexible Sparc architecture
Re:Hardware isolation (Score:2)
I don't think that this could work with the vserver patches as they are currently implemented. There is still only one kernel and (important bit here) one scheduler running: so all of your assorted vservers will run on the total number of procs aloted to the scheduler.
You might be able to hack up some sort of "vpsradm" command that instructed the scheduler to never assign processes from a certain vserver to a certain processor, but I suspect that such a thing is a lot easier to theorize about than to actually implement. (Actual kernel hackers are encouraged to add their two cents here.)
Re:Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:3, Informative)
Also the main server can see all the files in the virtual servers since it isn't chrooted.
Re:Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:2)
IBM is already running 15000+ linux servers (seperate kernel and all) on a single iron
Re:Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:5, Funny)
They're running that on an iron? My god, technology is moving so fast now. They've skipped right over the toaster.
Re:Beaowulf not the target audience (Score:2)
Isn't this sorta the opposite... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Isn't this sorta the opposite... (Score:3, Funny)
It even makes Julienne child processes!
Why ask why? (Score:1, Redundant)
The point is that this is *l337*. *That* is the point.
If there happens to be a practical application, that is completely secondary.
FLW ? (Score:2)
I am displeased to see so many of you people replying and asking why this would be a good idea.
The point is that this is *l337*. *That* is the point.
Somehow I'm sure I could find a similar phrase in a "famous last words" collection somewhere ;-)
Is it similar to ensim? (Score:2, Interesting)
I believe this package is very popular with webhosts. One user can totally hose the machine, the rest are not impacted. Trust me, I know.
User Mode Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:User Mode Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
The vunify tool has significance when differentiating between VM's and this.
Re:User Mode Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
The patches for compartmentalization which mimic FreeBSD's jail(8) feature are completely different. If they are done properly (and checking this will require some time), they can provide complete separation of the processes running in different compartments. Performance is probably a bit better, too, because only one kernel is running, and not a stack of two.
Again, if you need compartmentalization now, and you have security concerns, you should either use FreeBSD, or GNU/Linux on S/390. This new kernel feature will need a bit of time to settle down and work correctly (from a security point of view).
Can or User Mode be used as a better chroot? (Score:2)
Not having enough of a home DP Center to dedicate one box for a firewall, I end up running local services (properly configured for local ONLY access in addition to firewalled for local only) on the same machine. I think I've done a good job, but there's always that nagging doubt. Putting my local services in a -safe- virtual OS would give me an additional level of comfort. Chroot jails are ok for standalone things like BIND, but once you have several services interacting like a mail system, it gets a bit messy.
Actually this is kind of an old idea (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Actually this is kind of an old idea (Score:2)
Right now, my site [cheathouse.com] and a friends [systemvelocity.com] is each running on a Free/BSD split with about 10 other users - it's a virtual server, and I can install/do anything I feel like on it. I get:
> FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE (VKERN)
and
> BSDI BSD/OS 3.1 Virtual Kernel #17
(they are discontinuing BSD, afaik)
Virtual Servers (Score:1)
The software is released under the GPL, and is striving to be the most advanced and finely tuned web hosting system available.
More information can be found here:
http://www.freevsd.org/
mosix (Score:5, Interesting)
You could use mosix to combine the compute resources of several boxes to look like one box. And then, you could use this divy up the space so that people don't step on each other. When anyone (working in thier own space) kicks off a large compile, the load would transparently be distributed among all the boxen.
Of course, I have zippy experience with any of this, but it sounds possible.
Re:mosix (Score:1)
If you have N machines and greater than N users, it's probably better to install a batch system. There is already a shitload of flexibility in the _current_ UNIX environment especially WRT linking together of multiple machines. No need to mess with the absolute barebones with two patches, eh?
Re:mosix (Score:2)
Re:mosix (Score:2)
plan9 is a distributed architecture.
you don't need one pid space, that all sounds terribly over complicated
On plan9 you can happily debug code running on any of MIPS, SPARC, Motorola 68020, Intel 386 on any other plan9 box (permissions granted of course).
Multi-threading isn't the only way to build a big application.
ensim (Score:1)
what would happen.... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is... (Score:1, Insightful)
EXACTLY what the FreeBSD jail() call does...
Basically chroot on steroids...
Well, it is good the linux crowd took such
a good idea over.. if now only they would take
the concepts of having three branches ( RELEASE,STABLE,CURRENT) to the kernel...
On another note though.... with linux's history of root kit's, ths is certainly something i would not use for a commercial offering...
Re:This is... (Score:1, Funny)
(2.0, 2.2, 2.4)
Re:This is... (Score:2, Informative)
And you can do most of the same in Linux, with good old-fashioned chroot plus capabilities. No need for a separate system call.
Restricting to a specific IP address is a nice touch, and one thing Linux capabilities can't do, but it seems rather application-specific. It only allows one IP alias to the jailed process, and doesn't seem to cover any non-IPv4 addressing. And WTF do you have to specify a hostname? The kernel needs this information? (Or does the (2) in jail(2) not actually mean it's a syscall, like it doesn't in AIX?)
I'm also not sure if Linux capabilities are fine-grained enough to keep root from escaping a chroot without totally crippling it - but then again, jail() seems pretty crippling too. A virtual host server really shouldn't need root privs, other than bind-to-low-ports, and Linux capabilities do have that granularity.
*Extends arm, palm face up* (Score:2, Insightful)
Firstly, you're an idiot if you still haven't realized staff comments aren't in italics.
Secondly, Beowulf clusters were only mentioned because they are the complete opposite of the subject matter:
Beowulf clusters bring the computing power of several computers together for a single task, whereas with this a single computer could be used for several isolated tasks.
Some of you should hand over your geek badges, right now.
Hasn't IBM Been Doing This for Some Time? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not the processing power (Score:4, Informative)
It's the control over it.
Mainframes have insane amounts of control over user processes (a Linux image essentially becomes same), as well as the ability to allocate more resources, fewer, provide fine-grained process accounting, shut down processes, migrate them elsewhere (part of the IBM dataceter Linux concept is the ability to migrate nodes around the country as needed).
What a mainframe doesn't have to offfer is insane amounts of processor power or memory. Disk, and disk I/O are quite another matter -- the amount of aggregate bandwidth a z390 has to offer is impressive.
PC-based virtualization clearly has some advantages, through not all of those offered by a mainframe. A rack of virtualized PCs probably does offer a higher processor density than the equivalent mainframe, however.
Think about restricting services (Score:2, Interesting)
If it addresses many of the issues that normal chroot has, then it may be good.
Isolation of applications against each other.
It's going to be intresting to see how much overhead this has when compared to vmware, usermode linux, or just chroots. (Tried 'em all).
If the overhead of this is not higher than chroot then it will be a big win.
possible security vulnerability? (Score:1)
What happens in the following scenario:
A user spins off a vserver, specifying the IP address of the default gateway for the parent server. The user then somehow convinces the parent server that it really *is* the gateway, and effectively takes the parent server off the network. If this is possible, someone without physical access to the network, but with an unpriviledged login to the parent server, could effectively perform a DOS attack on it.
I must be missing something here. It can't be this simple. Can anyone point out where I've gone wrong?
Save money on hosting? (Score:2)
-
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. -Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898)
binding 2 servers to the same port? (Score:2)
What!?!? What happens when you bind, say, sshd to port 22 on multiple servers? Do you also need multiple ethernet cards and ip addresses? The docs don't say anything about that...
Re:binding 2 servers to the same port? (Score:2, Informative)
Humm, multi-proc boxes. (Score:2)
BTW, if you have a Sun StarFire with domains plugged into an EMC terabyte storage, you spent millions to do just that!
Isn't this a Virtual Private Server? (Score:2)
It seems like this is the same kind of thing this person is talking about...? Is this more general in some way? What exactly is my host using anyway?
Re:Isn't this a Virtual Private Server? (Score:2)
But it's obviously not a normal Linux system, since it's hosting multiple fully virtual systems on the same computer.
Re:Isn't this a Virtual Private Server? (Score:2)
A few people seem curious about this. I did a little research several months ago. Here's the places that looked decent:
http://www.asp-linux.com/en/services/hosting/power server.shtml
$65/mo -- a little sparse on information. I don't understand how you can have a VPS with limited POP boxes or no SSL. Maybe they just don't install it for you...?
http://www.vitalserver.com/prices/
$75/mo -- The website is a little sparse.
http://services.superb.net/sps/
$80/mo -- I've heard of them. Look competent. $90 when you pay quarterly, $80 only if you pay yearly.
http://www.lightspeedhost.com/vps/detailed.html
$80/mo -- same limitations as asp-linux...?
http://www.1000island.net/virtual.htm
$100/mo -- Looks half-assed. They have a phone number listed without an area code...
http://www.datapipe.com/privateserver.htm
$150/mo -- 10 IP address, reasonably cheap to get more.
http://home.verio.com/products/hosting/web/vps/vps standard.cfm
$150/mo -- FreeBSD (all others are Linux). Don't mention IP addresses -- only one?
Re:Isn't this a Virtual Private Server? (Score:2)
Unfortunately none of the big web-hosting review sites have anything about VPS -- just shared hosts and colos. I found it hard to find information.
Anyway, for the same price at superb.net you do get root and access to install whatever the heck you want. I bet the $150 deal at Verio is more like what you want. But as I look at it, it doesn't actually say anything about root. Most of the other places are pretty explicit about that.
If you don't get root, it's not a very big step above a shared host. I guess you can do long-running processes.
Security flaws (Score:2, Interesting)
Resource limits are needed by hosting companies (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux can natively be configured to enforce disk quotas and (with more difficulty) [linuxdoc.org] manage network bandwidth [linuxjournal.com] without any special virtual server software. Also the native unix process scheduling algorithm does reduce the priority of CPU bound tasks. The getrlimit(2) system call can be used to set various limits per process (not per virtual server unless the virtual server runs as one process I guess.) I know of no way to specifically limit disk bandwidth on Linux.
Freeware such as s_context [solucorp.qc.ca] and user mode linux [sourceforge.net] provide no control over how much resources one virtual server gets over another besides disk usage. Other limited resources like CPU, disk and network bandwidth (RAM?) are shared just like they would be shared by separate processes under a single Linux system.
FreeVSD [freevsd.org] is not a virtual server, but a collection of scripts, binaries and multiple copies of hard-linked read-only filesystems for the common system environment. It is has the best chance for winning the total performance award but has no extra features for resource limits between systems.
True virtual machines. (E.g., vmware [vmware.com]) provide very good isolation, but this leads to little sharing of excess unused resources between virtual servers I believe. They also have poorer performance in general because so much emulation is done.
The commercial, proprietary Private Server [ensim.com] product from Ensim [ensim.com] seems good from the marketing blurbs which say that they have "their own guaranteed share of the servers resources, including CPU, memory and bandwidth". I wonder what the performance penalty for this is and how much does it cost? Can anyone comment?
Re:Resource limits are needed by hosting companies (Score:2)
Re:Resource limits are needed by hosting companies (Score:2)
That's wrong, you can specify RAM allocation in UML.
Read this article commenting this patch (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.hispacluster.org/modules.php?op=modloa
In fact, this article was generated collecting the opinions of many users who post comments about this topic.
I hope it could give you some ideas about the implication of this important feature in the Linux future.
*This* is why open source works (Score:5, Insightful)
The beauty of this is that there's *one* kernel running so, apart from any overhead of selecting the environment, you pretty much get the same performance as running native. This has got to have 1001 applications.
One of the things I'd personally like to see is some kind of overlaid filesystem so each image by default gets
Re:*This* is why open source works (Score:2, Informative)
Re:*This* is why open source works (Score:2, Insightful)
CPU Time limits and scheduling (Score:3)
A similar thing would be desireable for resident set size (real RAM usage) and virtual size (process size) per security context.
It's called.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not cluster, partition! (Score:2, Informative)
Forget arguing about the definition of a 'cluster'. This is the technology that differentiates between PCs, servers, and mainframes.
IBM and Unisys mainframes (perhaps others, I've worked with these) have hardware partitions where CPUs are divided up. Linux is there now too.
chroot safe? (Score:2, Interesting)
Unix and Linux have always had the chroot() system call. This call was used to trap a process into a sub-directory. After the system-call, the process is led to believe that the sub-directory is now the root directory. This system call can't be reversed. In fact, the only thing a process can do is trap itself further and further in the file-system (calling chroot() again).
And...
The vserver is trapped into a sub-directory of the main server and can't escape. This is done by the standard chroot() system call found on all Unix and Linux boxes.
But, I thought you couldn't (safely) run root processes in a chroot jail, because escape is easy if you can call chroot? Eg, create a subdirectory in your jail and chroot to that (keeping the same current directory), then chroot("../../../../") to get out of jail. Is it really safe to give someone the root password to a vserver in this system?
give every app a virtual machine? (Score:2)
Yet another use (Score:2)
Note: for most packages there are ways to do this anyway, but they can become a PITA.
Advantages of Clusters (Score:2, Interesting)
Having sufficient RAM is the largest factor in commodity grade webhosting services, so having mutlitple instances of a cluster on the same machine does not really make sense, when the whole point of a cluster is to give faster computation and access time.
btw- we offer both of these services here [imeme.net], and we do it on FreeBSD [freebsd.org].
Gee, just like Solaris. And... (Score:2)
Which is definitely not to say that it's a bad or late thing--it's nice to see Linux playing with the Big Boys (tm) now and again. Just don't think that it's ground-breaking technology.
My hopeful use for this... (Score:2)
During the course of my job, I have to recreate customer environments to duplicate their problems. Often these environments involve firewalls, NAT, or simply multiple subnets that are difficult and time-consuming to get past our IT guys (and even once we convince them of the need, it may be a week before any real progress is made on their end to set things up).
However, using this, I can hopefully get a single box set up with several "systems" using internal virtual networks that will allow me to have something like...
1: Server / Client Gateway
2: Client
3: Firewall / NAT / Router
4: Client Gateway
5: Client
With 1 and 2 being "inside" the firewall and 4 and 5 being "outside".
This would allow me to eliminate TONS of bureaucratic red-tape paperwork BS, and give a self-contained environment for some of my other coworkers to educate themselves on (95% of which have never done any actual hands-on work with a firewall or even done any routing).
While all this could be easily accomplished using a multi-processor Sun box and their domain / partitioning scheme, those tend to be a little more pricey than the dual-P2 I've already got sitting idle in the corner of my office...
Any comments on the feasibility of this scenario?
Would this package work for what I'd like to do?
Thanks...
-l
Well. (Score:2)
umlinux (I suspect this is not what's going on)
and
freevsd (Check it out)
http://www.freevsd.org
Real world use - vserver and usermodelinux (Score:2)
I was even offered root access once to fix this provider's host but I had to refuse due to responsibility for all the other clients with virtual websites. The problems generally do not come from things that would crash a kernel, but from the economics of getting individuals to apply appropriate knowledge in the right place at the right time, within the context of a number of companies working together with their own agendas.
Using this virtual server patch, I can see a *lot* of time, effort, danger, stress, complaints, etc. all swept away into history!
Run a virtual servers on your local dev box and the remote staging and live machines, then use rsync from local to staging. Ssh into staging and rsync again, or have the admin staff do so. But the live machine can be isolated network-wise, so it is more likely that the user could be allowed onto the live server themselves.
Of course, 1) it isn't a real compartment with your own filesystem and everything, so for example installing Perl modules, tweaking boot scripts, or tweaking security ain't happening. 2) it isn't strong compartmentalization. And 3) you have to be running a linux kernel in the first place. And 4) the above problems tend to involve Suns, not linux boxes.
Seems this kind of idea is killer though. It would be really interesting if we could run something like this or (maybe better yet) user-mode-linux efficiently as a process inside a SunOS environment. Sounds like IBM had the right idea running a bunch of complete OS images on their heavy iron.
Re:bah (Score:2)
A virtual Beowulf that is physically a beowulf node itself...Naah, that'd take some clever hacking, a cluster of cluster servers. Probably not possible.
Re:bah (Score:2, Funny)
Re:bah (Score:2)
type beowulf=packed array[0..255] of system;
type cluster=packed array[0..255,0..255,0..255] of beowulf;
Slightly recursive...
cluster[0[255],0[255],0[255]] = isPrime(bignumhere);
Thats if I remember my multidimensional linked arrays correctly. (and no, it isn't C++ either, sorta Pascal.)
Re:bah (Score:4, Insightful)
Not only would it be cool for developers to test Beowulf-enabled code, but it would be awesome to have each node independantly accessible from the network.
Re:bah (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Machines.. (Score:2)
Re:Machines.. (Score:2)
#include "beowulf.h"
or
#include "cluster.h"
Windows 2000 Advanced Server comes with clustering built in via the "cluster" command, you probably don't want that though, because it wouldn't run on the 450 and probably pretty slow on the Duron.
Re:Machines.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Machines.. (Score:2, Informative)
Two common uses for a cluster:
To answer your question, a web server can use either proxying or round-robin DNS without any special support from the main web server software. Of course, you have to have the proxy / DNS server running correctly. (Also, you obviously have to have either a shared or a synced filestore for your actual web site.)
Re:Machines.. (Score:1)
Someone doesn't read the article before commenting (Score:1)
It would help if you would read more than just the title before you commented...
Re:Someone doesn't read the article before comment (Score:1)
Actually I did, which is why I added my comment about adding this TO a hardware cluster. What I was querying was that a) the title of the article appeared to be misleading and 2) It doesnt really seem to me to be much of a point on a single box.
But as I said, with a hardware cluster AND this, now that's a good idea.
Re:Someone doesnt understand the reason for a clus (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that was whoever wrote the headline. This doesn't buy you what a cluster buys you, which is more MIPS and RAM working on the same problem. This buys you multiple relatively independent environments on one machine. Hence the reference in the
parallel file systems (Score:2)
What many people think it means is often something like a parallel file system [clemson.edu]. which is not the same.
If I recall right, backups can be a pain [clemson.edu], but that would vary and depend on the software
Re:Pointless? (Score:1)
Did you only read the title?? Next time try reading the link (or at least the write-up) before you make a comment...
Re:Pointless? (Score:2, Informative)
Well, for one, you can now setup a virtual cluster to test out your apps...
Re:who the crap is chrisd? (Score:1)
Re:wow (Score:3, Offtopic)
I know this is completely off-topic, but here it is anyway.
Your understanding of the prefix "meta-" is incomplete. In addition to indicating syntactic self-reference (see Hofstader), it can also indicate semantic self-reference (see... well, Hofstader; he talks about this, too, in his discussion of GOD: God Over Djinn).
SGI has a device for connecting crossbar routers together to form large single-system-image computers. It's called a metarouter:a router for routers.
Likewise, a cluster of clusters would be properly called a metacluster. Since "Beowulf" is commonly synonymous with "cluster," the term "meta-beowulf" is pretty much correct, even though it makes me cringe.
Re:kernel dev? (Score:2, Informative)
offtopic: Re:Behold, the power of Open Source... (Score:2)
No, moron, it means that I don't have to whore for points. Your mommy should have pointed that out to you when she read you the article to which you replied.