I was researching for a blog entry I was going to write about clustering, clustered file-systems and positing whether the future of x86 virtualisation was a Single System Image hypervisor allowing seamless automatic migration of virtual machines between hosts and whether we could see some kind of automated tiering for applications or whether just faking SSI with clever load-balancing/migration technologies might be good enough when I came across Greg Pfister's blog here.
Greg wrote 'In Search of Clusters' which was pretty much the Bible when I was working in HPC and clustering; I don't know where my copy is any more unfortunately and I note that the publication date was in 1997; so it's probably a little bit out of date. But his blog is a great read and I can recommend it to anyone who is interested in virtualisation and Cloud; it'll fill the gap until he writes another book.
And he points to another great blog written by Charlie Stross who has come up with the acronym 'WNPoT' which stands for Wonderful New Piece of Technology which I suspect is another way of saying 'Awesome Sauce'.
p.s Yes, I suspect we will see some attempts at a SSI hypervisor; IBM have a statement of direction for z/VM leading down that route, so I expect some brave soul to try to do the same for x86. But for the time being, I think faking it with some good tools might be good enough.
Thanks Martin,
In Search of Clusters was one of the best tech books I’ve ever read and I’m glad to be re-awakened to Greg Pfister by your post.