On Sun, Apr 19, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Skip Tavakkolian <9nut@9netics.com> wrote:

> > Well, in the octopus you have a fixed part, the pc, but all other
> > machines come and go. The feeling is very much that your stuff is in
> > the cloud.
>
> i was going to mention this.  to me the current view of cloud
> computing as evidence by papers like this[1] are basically hardware
> infrastructure capable of running vm pools each of which would do
> exactly what a dedicated server would do.  the main benefits being low
> administration cost and elasticity.  networking, authentication and
> authorization remain as they are now.  they are still not addressing
> what octopus and rangboom are trying to address: how to seamlessly and
> automatically make resources accessible.  if you read what ken said it
> appears to be this view of cloud computing; he said "some framework to
> allow many loosely-coupled Plan9 systems to emulate a single system
> that would be larger and more reliable".  in all virtualization
> systems i've seen the vm has to be smaller than the environment it
> runs on.  if vmware or xen were ever to give you a vm that was larger
> than any given real machine it ran on, they'd have to solve the same
> problem.


I'm not sure a single system image is any better in the long run than
Distributed Shared Memory.  Both have issues of locality, where the
abstraction that gives you the view of a single machine hurts your ability
to account for the lack of locality.

In other words, I think applications should show a single system image but
maybe not programming models.  I'm not 100% sure what I mean by that
actually, but it's sort of an intuitive feeling.


>
>
> [1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf
>
>
>