[plug] VM made out of a cluster of real servers?

[Marcos Raul Carot Collins]

It's just for fun.

I'm a tinkerer, and have a number of machines to experiment for a couple weeks  
:)


Thanks for the responses!


On Fri, 29 Jun 2012 03:49:51 PM Andrew Cooks wrote:
> Hi
> 
> There are various options for running a Single System Image cluster
> where the OS is aware of multiple nodes. Last time I checked, they had
> typical limitations of not being able to run different threads of a
> single process across multiple nodes and not being able to migrate
> processes doing memory mapped io.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image
> http://lwn.net/Articles/384200/
> 
> I don't think that a hypervisor that can span multiple nodes of
> generic PC hardware and run a regular PC OS is commercially available,
> but it would definitely be interesting to see what can be done with
> the SGI Altix machines.
> 
> Consider the IBM mainframe. It was around before the beginning of time
> (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970).  It can run multiple OSs. It has
> multiple independent processor boards that you can replace without
> shutting down the whole machine. Can any arbitrary processor be
> assigned to, or removed from any VM?
> 
> There's usually a more efficient way to do things. Once you've
> analysed the problem that would require such a machine well enough
> that you could build the machine, you'll have a more elegant and
> robust solution that doesn't require such a machine. There are just
> too many layers of abstraction between the application and the bare
> metal and to get reasonable performance with the old PC way of
> building the application into one massive process.
> 
> From a practical perspective, can you think of any task that would
> require such an architecture?
> 
> A.
> 
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Marcos Raúl Carot Collins
> 
> <marcos.carot at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi there,
> > 
> > I been just curious of whether is possible to build a VM on top of a
> > cluster, in such a way that the VM has the processing power and memory of
> > the cluster as if it was one machine.
> > 
> > Google says things like clustering services, or Beowulf clusters, but
> > could not find anything about say a Qemu, Xen or similar based on a
> > cluster of hardware.
> > 
> > Any ideas? Have you heard of such setup?
> > 
> > Thanks!
> > 
> > --
> > Marcos R Carot Collins
> > 
> > Business:
> > -Sound Therapy -http://www.soundtherapyperth.com
> > 
> > Family:
> > -Carot Collins
> > -http://www.carotcollins.com
> > 
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