Re: VFS ROADMAP (and vfs01.patch stage 1 available for testing)

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon said on Aug 13, 2004 at 09:45:09:
>     So, for example, take cryptography.  In particular consider the prime
>     number factoring problem that is used to break public keys.  That winds
>     up being a huge parallelizable sparse matrix operation (or most of
>     it anyway).  If someone were to write a standard threaded program but
>     took care to partition the memory such that threads tended to stick to
>     their own areas of the matrix 'most of the time'... that is something
>     I want DragonFly to be able to cluster naturally, with full data
>     coherency and transparency.

Thanks for that explanation.  This would be very useful to a lot of
people, it sounds exciting!

So the idea could be, every user's workstation in a scientific lab
could be part of such a cluster: at one level it's their regular
desktop machine, but at another level it's also a high-performance
computing cluster.  Much better than the current setup of having a
256-node cluster but also providing 256 separate workstations, one for
each user.  At an extreme limit perhaps several labs could network all
their machines this way to create an enormous cluster.  For some kinds
of problems the benefits could be huge...  

My own plans are a bit in the air, I'm moving soon, but I hope to have
some time in coming months to understand this better and try to
contribute in some way.

Rahul