* Jim Witte <jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us> on Fri, 17 May 2002
| Can they be liquid-cooled (is that neccessary, or just a really big
| heat-sink)
15000 RPM drives can be air cooled, but they need massive air flow. They
just aren't something I want to pack into a data center, at least not just
yet.
| I don't know what a TruCluster is, but I've read that MacOS X
| theoretically supports a type of clustering where all the machines will
| act as one really fast CPU (with some really bad latency issues I would
| presume).
TruCluster is Compaq's implementation of VAX clustering on Tru64 UNIX. In
such a cluster, all peripheral devices are shared: disks and filesystems,
tapes, CD-ROMs, etc. Devices can be on a shared bus (fast for everyone),
or local to a node. Each node in the cluster operates independantly. The
entire cluster can be referenced with a single IP address, with node 0
acting as a load balancer between all nodes. This kind of cluster is
really good for applications which need fast servers sharing data, like a
huge database on a Fibre Channel disk farm with a half-dozen server nodes.
A computing cluster, like what you describe, Beowulf, and the like, glom
together CPU time, but usually not peripherals, so any shared data needs to
be shared via NFS or other slow mechanism. Computing clusters are really
good for number crunching. They are not so useful as application servers
because they cannot share data among nodes.
| And I figure at some point Apple will figure out how to get their bus
| architecture fast enough to do more than 2-CPU computers (or move to a
| new architecture all together), so we might see quad- or octal- (octet?)
| CPU configs some day.
Apple is -way- behind DEC/Compaq on this.
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