Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:
> Most high availability clusters have proprietary memory interlinks for this
> end. Wasn't there some development/work on sharing memory state over
> (dedicated) Ethernet links?
Are you thinking of Mosix (and associated friends, such as OpenMosix)?
We tried running OpenMosix at work across a few machines; the results
were underwhelming (compared to LSF). Our application, though, might be
written in such a way that it defeats clustering: a control process is
run on each node, and it forks off simulation processes which run for a
few seconds, return the results, and die. For OM, we ran a single
control process; it never migrated, and the simulation processes
finished so quickly that OM was reluctant to migrate them.
Personally, I'd be more interested in the reverse concept: a bunch of
machines which act like a single machine with redundancy (for, say, a
high availability storage/authentication/database server). A read
transaction could be satisfied by any single node; a write transaction
would be broadcast to all nodes. Individual nodes could be taken
offline for maintenance; upon return to the cluster, it would receive
the missing transactions from other nodes to resync itself.