[Info-vax] Time to turn DECUServe into a mixed VMScluster?

[Chris Townley]

On 03/06/2023 00:08, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 6/2/2023 1:36 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> On 2023-06-02, abrsvc <dansabrservices at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> I have real VAX, Alpha and Itanium systems.  Perhaps if I spin up
>>> an X86 version and cluster all of them together that would
>>> suffice? I can add some emulated systems to the mix for fun too.
>>>
>>> What would make this a PR win?   What proof would you want for
>>> this? I am willing to put it together if it makes sense.
>>>
>>
>> To be honest Dan, I am not really seeing the PR merits of just
>> linking a current architecture (x86-64), two obsolete architectures
>> (VAX and Alpha), and one mostly obsolete architecture (Itanium)
>> together in a cluster.
>>
>> The general reaction to that outside of the VMS world is likely to
>> be "so what ?".
>>
>> I should also point out you can build a Linux cluster across a
>> larger range of architectures. Even if the Linux clustering
>> capabilities are not as advanced as VMS, these days they can be made
>> to be suitable for a good range of tasks.
> 
> You are missing the point.
> 
> The interesting aspect of the different hardware architectures for VMS
> is not the different instruction sets per se but the age they belong to.
> 
> I am sure that RHEL 9 / x86-64 and RHEL 9 / ARM64 are very compatible
> and interoperable.
> 
> But the VMS equivalent of that would be that VMS 9 / x86-64 and
> the *non-existing* VMS 9 / Itanium are very compatible
> and interoperable.
> 
> The fact that VMS / VAX, VMS / Alpha, VMS / Itanium and VMS / x86-64
> are compatible and interoperable should be compared to:
> 
> SunOS 4.1 - Solaris 2.7 - RHEL 2 - RHEL 9
> WinNT 3.1 - Win 2000 - Win 2008R2 - Win 2022
> 
> or something like that.
> 
> Is that a fair comparison? Not really. But marketing is
> not about being fair!
> 
>> What _would_ be PR worthy is exactly what HP/HPE did 15 years ago,
>> when they physically destroyed cluster nodes and then everyone
>> watched while the remaining nodes recovered without data loss,
>> especially if VMS was still the way fastest to recover as it was back
>> then.
>>
>> However, expectations have moved on since then and such an explosion 
>> and simulated workload would have to be on a far larger scale than
>> it was back then to be really newsworthy.
> 
> Everybody can do stuff like that today.
> 
> The fact that the functionality is typical in the applications
> and not the OS does not matter much.
> 
> Arne
> 

That reminds me of the famous bug in the Windows 3.11 calculator.
3.11 - 3.10 = 0

-- 
Chris