[HECnet] Getting a virtual cluster connected

[Cory Smelosky]

On 25 Dec 2012, at 15:26, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

On 12/25/2012 03:21 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
Brian (Hechinger) and I once discussed the possibility of
implementing a similar clustering system within NetBSD.   I
think just implementing the SCS protocol itself would be a good
start.   I wonder if there's enough documentation out there to
do it.

What'd be really interesting is joining that to a VMS cluster.
;)

It would be a huge amount of work, and I'm not sure it'd be
practical. There are a lot of things in VMS that just don't have a
mappable counterpart in the UNIX world.   RMS, for instance.

And a versioned filesystem. ;)

Yes, but there's nothing stopping an enterprising soul from
implementing ODS under UNIX.   Speaking of which, this is no relation to
ODS, but I had the beginnings of the RT-11 filesystem implemented under
NetBSD many years ago. (I really should finish that, but time   )

If you end up finishing that, I have a friend that would probably really love it.


Brian H and I were discussing this (this was, what, eight years
ago Brian?) in the context of building a tightly-coupled cluster of
NetBSD machines, with the same basic capabilities (as adjusted for
the environment) as VMS' clustering...tight shared filesystem,
distributed locking, etc.   We even discussed process migration.

Nice! I still don't see why it's taking UNIX/Linux so long to catch
up to features VMS has had since the '80s. ;)

Mostly because the current featureset is most of what the world needs
and expects right now.   Sure, one could do a LOT more with the
underlying features of VMS, but nobody left today knows how to do those
things...everything is a flat "stream of bytes" file, etc.   We've gained
a lot, but we've also lost a lot.

At least it's not an entire filesystem that's an SQL database. ;)


                          -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA