[Discuss] Whence distributed operating systems?

[Rich Pieri]

On 4/21/2016 12:50 AM, Mike Small wrote:
> "Sadly it seems that we now need to either wait for Linux or Windows to
> catch up with the 1980s state of the art in distributed systems (think
> Locus or AFS). What went wrong? Products like DataSynapse’s FabricServer
> look like an interesting attempt to address the problem, at least for
> the Java world, but it feels to me that mainstream operating systems
> designers seem to have lost the plot somewhere along the way."

What went "wrong" is that the author has the expectation that
distributed systems are the be-all, end-all of computing. They're not.
As with any highly specialized tool, distributed systems are great at
some kinds of tasks and mediocre to terrible for everything else.


On 4/21/2016 8:11 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> No, because you need to deal with parallelism issues on a single
> server. Pocket computers now have four simultaneously working cores.
> It got really hard for CPUs to get faster -- how long has the state
> of the art hovered around 4GHz -- so the process improvements lead to
> more cores, instead.

Eight cores in some of the flagships, now. My Tab S2 has two quad-core
processors in it, one 1.9GHz and one 1.3GHz.

But yeah, the single system image model is a dead end. The idea is to
scale vertically but the complexity and performance issues with
non-uniform memory and processing architectures scale worse than
linearly. Horizontal scaling typically scales better. The performance
hits are heavily front loaded in the batch/queue mechanisms. Once past
these the job is free to run on all nodes in the pool or cluster
independent of the other nodes' resources.

-- 
Rich P.