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 > > >