21 Nov
2017
21 Nov
'17
2:51 p.m.
On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 7:00 AM, Ron Natalie <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
The other choice is to use TCF. TCF allowed you to transparently run
binaries on a remote machine and it took care of redirecting stdin/stdout
back to your machine.
It did a heck of lot more than that. TCF made all the systems
participating in the cluster one transparent machine - TCF - the
Transparent Computing Facility. Processes migrated between processors, for
execution. Your 'login session' was as Ron points out typically an
x-windows/xterm. But resources that you used over the course of the
session could be anywhere within the cluster. Nodes could come and go
and the cluster survive. You can read all about it in the Locus book
which available from Amazon [MIT press - Popek and Walker].
The two biggest errors IMO was that the cluster size was screwed down to 32
and the kernel was ad hoc and very heavily hacked, so it was hard to put
the features into other systems.
FYI: the follow on to it, TNC (Transparent Network Computing); corrected
both of those issues. TNC becme the OS for Intel Paragon which scaled to
4096 nodes. Locus moved the technology into 18 different components and
made them available separately. They were all eventually made open
source. The TNC file system became DEC's TruCluster FS, a project which I
lead and brought me to DEC. I had also lead a group in Boston that had
put TNC into HP-UX with full process migration before we did the work for
DEC actually, but HP cancelled the project before it ever shipped. Bruce
and the west coast Locus folks put most of TNC into Linux a few years ago
before he retired and as I say, succeeded to release it as open source -- I
can dig up a URL for that project, if folks are interested. I had it
running on a small 8 node cluster about 8-10 years ago; it was very cool;
but was using a older version of the RH and a 2.4 Linux kernel around the
time Linux went to the the 2.6 kernel.
Clem