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To: Robert who wrote (21655)	10/23/1999 2:04:00 PM
From: Stormweaver	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 64865

Good point. I would say that clustering is not required which could greatly reduce synchronization latencies. Application components should be inherently distributed. The only problem comes in when we are talking about data storage. Most people think that all data must reside centrally and managed by one or two machines through the use of RAID and shared disks. The reality is that doesn't matter - just as long as all the data is somewhere in the node group and replicated. In EBAY's case they could have node groups that serve particular categories. Interestingly, the price/performance TPC leader is a 4-way x86 box running NT + SQLServer (checkout www.tpc.org). I expect the new 8-ways to do extremely well. Cheers James

To: Robert who wrote (21655)	10/23/1999 6:10:00 PM
From: paul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Robert, can you elaborate more on what Beowulf is? I recall something about it being a academic project where they clustered a large number of PC's with Linux. my contentions: Having a single large SMP is much easier to scale - you can start with a small number of cpu's and add cpu's as your needs require - no break or change in the OS, application, administration, etc... single SMP is much more manageable - managing a complex of 64 PC's doesnt sound like fun to me (synch os, apps, patches, etc..) - do you get a single file system image with beowulf? Beowulf is an academic project suitable for the HPC/academic world - RAS isnt really an issue - Commercial and HPC use rarely have similar goals - as a "proof of concept" beowulf sounds interesting though.