[Info-vax] "The Machine"

[IanD]

Another interesting post...

Seems this machine idea is focusing on getting the core component of memory and in particular, extremely large amounts of shared memory working and from there you'll be able to plug in other OS's eventually. Interesting.
This could stem the tide of everyone being shoehorned into a linux existence if other OS's learn to play nice on this system when complete?

This is a different idea to my idea of reworking VMS clusters to support virtual VMS cluster, the Machine could potentially create systems that are a hell of a lot faster

I was looking at some other related ideas a while ago around distributed memory and got me to thinking yet again about how VMS could expand it's cluster vision

I'm an advocate of a virtual cluster type of arrangement, where you can combine nodes or even clusters into a virtual cluster and share resources across them, including memory so that a virtual process is a silhouette for a real compute process that sits out there 'somewhere' in a real cluster with resources mapped against the entire virtual cluster that is is part of so that it can use those resources as those it was attached to an infinitely large machine. The HP Machine idea is in some ways similar, except very tightly integrated

While we are at it, why limit VMS clusters to VMS? The clustering component once ported to x86-64 could be potentially licensed to run on other OS's, in time. 
It's not so much the underlining OS that get people excited IMO, it's how to tie them together in larger and larger bundles to handle larger and larger workloads and do it seamlessly seem to me is whats exciting

I'm of the opinion VMS clusters need an overhaul (in time of course, gotta get x86-64 happening first). Linux clusters have usurped the cluster name, so VMS needs to reinvent what clustering can do

Is this Machine, the ultimate future of enterprise computing?
Ultra-large memory slabs like a giant VMware system that allows all those individual OS's running on it to finally be able to share their memory at speeds that don't cripple them?

Once you go down this path, what next? Concepts like data sharing through file interface agreements, or exchange formats or even network traffic between machines all go away if one can share memory at speed. The possibilities really start to expand

If I understand this correctly, computing becomes almost parallel in nature again. 
e.g. If I have an image of a brain scan of a patient loaded into memory on one system that did the capture, now I have another machine or machines scanning that image in shared memory looking for brain abnormalities, at the same time I am archiving that image to long term storage at the same time my billing system is updating. So the slowest pipe becomes getting the data into memory but once it is there, a whole world of parallel possibilities open up. This is interesting indeed. 

VMS had better shake a leg if this is the type of thing it's going to have to compete against...