Looking for speakers on High Performance Computing at GTALUG

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 04:28:52PM -0500, Myles Braithwaite wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 4:26 PM, Lennart Sorensen
>> <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> > Please tell me you meant s/Distrusted/Distributed/g.
>>
>> *Blow face in shame* Yes.. Would you like to do the talk on
>> Distributed Programming?

Actually, I really liked that substitution!  It seems mighty evocative
to me of some of the troublesome aspects of it :-).

> I wouldn't consider myself qualified for it.  I know in involves openMPI
> and such, but I haven't done any.  I do love those systems though.
>
> I am still wondering what a distrusted filesystem would be like.  Does the
> application have to assume the filesystem can't be trusted and add all
> sorts of redundancy, error correction and checksums itself?

I presume that he meant "distributed filesystem" here, as well, which
would mean stuff like:
- Lustre
- GFS, GFS2
- OCFS

These are all ways of combining bunches of disks to implement a single
filesystem.

There is, of course, the alternative view of DFS, where the notion is
that you might multiple instances of the *user* perspective of a
filesystem, as with:
- Coda
- InterMezzo
- AFS

The cool bit with Coda (which I'm pretty sure also applies to
InterMezzo) was that you could mount your user's filesystem, have it
cache the contents, and then you could take your laptop for a walk,
making changes locally, and having them get pushed to other copies
when you reconnect.  But that's quite a different view, and I believe
interest in this has considerably flagged.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
Pablo Picasso  - "Computers are useless. They can only give you
answers." - http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/pablo_picasso.html
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists