From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <432986CB.8040909@lanl.gov> Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 08:35:55 -0600 From: Ronald G Minnich User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (X11/20050317) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] killing processes References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 88682430-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Fco. J. Ballesteros wrote: > Well, we could use Kill as said here, or even > reboot the machine on saturdays 5am to make it clean, > etc. that's the one nice thing about a cluster node. You have lots of 'em, they can be single user. So just let one cpu user in to one cluster node at a time, and when they leave, reboot the node. If it's linuxbios the node is back in 10 seconds or so, and if it is a linuxbios+plan 9 node running xcpu, even faster than that (Plan 9 xcpu nodes boot in 1 second in Xen). > However, the PCs have so much CPU today that they don't even > feel the need for a CPU server. And that's the fun part. The relative power relationship of terminal/cpu server got inverted about 10 years ago. In the kernel there is this comment about ' ... for the big boys'. But, nowadays, the desktop is way more powerful than any individual cluster node (well, if by nowadays, you mean, "starting in 1992..."). So the "big boy" is on your desk, and the toy computer is in your rack. It's just that there are so MANY toy computers in the racks ... the ants overwhelm the elephant. And on the really Big Boy, i.e. the BG/L machine at livermore, the individual CPUs are running at clock rates that are "SO 1990s" -- 600 Mhz! But, given 65K of them, well, you don't mind that they're slow. In that sense, the 'cpu server' is outdated nomenclature. ron