I feel like if you have a single system image, process migration is easy (or at least tractible), but without that, it's going to be pretty challenging. Live migration of VMs across hypervisors is more approachable than migrating a process between two individual systems... You've got all that I/O that needs to be proxied, etc.
Single system image across multiple nodes doesn't seem to be getting much mindshare either.
I did a research SSI in the early 2000s. After getting it largely to work, we kind of put it aside. Why would we aspire to using 'ps' and 'ls' and 'mount' and such to manage our large scale systems? surely there was a better model.
20 years later people are still sshing into nodes to fuss around, and treating cluster nodes like pets. it still could be done pretty easily, I guess its not really in anyone's interest to invest the 2 years it would take. there is a lot more money to be made nibbling around the edges of the problem.
I've used systems with bits and pieces of this and IMHO, it feels pretty tempting to build this... But yeah, the real question is what application do you or will you run that requires it and is it worth the cost to build?
Especially if you can do similarish stuff in other ways. There's several distributed filesytems available now. There's lots of process orchestration tools. Single nodes today can be enormous compared to single nodes and even some clusters from the 2000s.
to me the goal of having 'ps' show everything in the cluster is kind of cute at best.
but yes, right now you install all kinds of services and support nodes, and distributed filesystems, and orchestration tools and software management tools and job schedulers. every cluster is a bespoke mess that takes a large staff to maintain and is always broken.
this is kind of the projection of web software onto hpc clusters.
in the 90s it wasn't nearly as hard to run a supercomputer because it was an integrated software platform. they were still a lot dodgier than the needed to be. but you could run a 64k node system with one support person, and there weren't really very many support tickets because things just mostly worked.
but I certainly can't imagine trying to do a company that solves this problem. or I should say I keep trying to and just seeing failure. part of the issue is that the people that you are selling to are personally and monetarily invested in the status quo. I don't think they _want_ to relieved of the burden of messing around with Kubernetes all the time, and having distributed filesystems that need to be nursed all the time, or having provisioning tools that have a 80% success rate and take hours to spin up a node.
> but I certainly can't imagine trying to do a company that solves this problem. or I should say I keep trying to and just seeing failure.
Yep, I don't think a system for this is something you can sell by itself, unless you're selling mainframes. You'd need to be selling an application that needs the system to run.
I don't really know what kind of application really needs SSI clustering though. I've used clustering in a few different domains, but never really felt like SSI would be a clear win.
Maybe it's chicken and egg though? If SSI clustering was more available, would applications that really leveraged it arise?
The process migration + use spare capacity on the corporate network case feels potentially compelling, but only with the right kinds of workloads ... and that would be hard to sell.
fwiw I think it would reduce a lot of friction for the end user and probably increase utilization quite a bit. my new take on this problem is to arrange that shared resources are dynamically associated with your environment, rather than being assembled into one giant shared environment. so that if you run a program on your laptop that uses large scale compute resources, those remote threads see the same OS view that a local thread would. still not a business but I think potentially valuable. its strange how many solutions fall into that space.
I invented VM live migration to solve the problems with traditional process migration, and my work was inspired by both Sprite and MOSIX. I believe that VM migration is in wide use today, especially at hyperscalers.
Mike Nelson, who worked on Sprite, invented VM live migration in parallel with me, but secretly within VMware.
Yeah-- no kidding. When I was anosmic with COVID I couldn't eat much of anything. Food was just terrible. I still remember the soulless paste that was peanut butter. (Ugh. It was so bad...)
I am reminded of the saying in my family: Anything is edible if you're willing to eat it.
My late father-in-law ate entire apples-- core and all. I've tried but I can't stomach the texture or how much more the fibrous parts of the core get stuck in my teeth. It doesn't disgust me, I just don't prefer it.
Not to miss an opportunity to talk about apples:
I started eating three apples / day for lunch last year. I hadn't realized how dirty apples are. I assumed the washing they get in processing gets them pretty clean. It does not. I wet them and clean the stem and flower areas with a paper towel. I'm shocked at how dirty the towel ends up.
I'm a sweet apple kind of guy. Envy apples are the bomb. I used to like Honeycrisp but the rumors of their being bred into shitty tastelessness are true. They're terrible. Shockingly, sometimes Red Delicious, which I'd previously relegated to the "buy as a last resort" list, are actually pretty good now. Fuji, Gala, and Cosmic Crisp are all decent specimens.
My wife likes Pink Lady but I think they're just a little too tart. She can also put away the Granny Smiths which I find to be horrifyingly sour. Ick!
Anybody have feelings about other apple varieties a person like me might be into?
I don’t know much about apple variety names, but if you love apples and plan to visit Aomori prefecture in Japan during apple season, I highly recommend stopping by a market or grocery. I used to live in northern Akita and there was a farmer from Aomori that would come by with freshly picked apples to sell at one of the supermarkets. They had many varieties and they all tasted amazingly sweet and unique. I have yet to find an apple anywhere close to those since moving back to the states. The most recent new variety that I tried that I liked was Kiku. It’s like a sweeter version of a Fuji apple with a very similar texture. Based on your preferences, I think this would a fun one to try.
I don't eat mushrooms-- can't stand the texture. I heard a podcast episode re: death cap mushrooms and it was chilling. A guy in the podcast talked about tasting a death cap then spitting it out and rinsing his mouth. He said they had a good taste.
Aren't the seeds of the apple supposed to contain cyanide? Article points this out too and risk doesn't seem worth it. I used to eat the whole apple long time ago until someone pointed that out and from my googling, it was correct. Now I try to eat all of the apple except the seeds and stem.
I like putting my apples in the fridge. Love me a cold and crisp gala apple. On very rare occasion, the gala I get are mushy. But otherwise, they are my favorite.
You would need to eat the seeds of SEVERAL HUNDRED apples in one sitting, and you would need to grind them up finely beforehand to get full amygdalin absorption.
We're talking about almost a cup, or 100+ grams of apple seed here.
Your body continually neutralizes cyanide with the enzyme rhodanese, so there's also no danger of cyanide accumulation from eating a few apples a day.
Soluna is like eating crispy wine and is currently at the top of my list. Prior to finding that, Lady Alice improves on Pink Lady, and it was my rockstar favorite. Envy is my go-to year-round when I can’t find rarer varietals; I’ve eaten hundreds of them. Cosmic Crisp is a fine last resort when Honeycrisp is too bright. Consider also trying Rubinette, Arkansas Black, Zestar. My notes say Wild Twist is a former Lady Alice but I definitely rank it just below L.A.
On the flipside: Kanzi “disappointment with every bite”, Ambrosia “pie apple because the raw texture sucks”, Autumn Glory DNF, Kissabel “lost its joy and turned grassy, DNF” Sugarbee “kinda one note, chewy, technically better than Red Delicious” Sweetango “knockoff Honeycrisp”, Evercrisp “painfully crisp, annoying to eat, fades to zero, looks like it was factory-polished, DNF”, Dazzle “all the flavourlessness of a Red Delicious with a nice crisp”, Ginger Gold “ten seconds of wonder and then mushes into disgusting texture and flavorlessness”
I still cut out the core when I slice an apple. I don't know the anatomical terminology well, but the "plastic-ey" texture of, I believe, the endocarp is what I don't like. It reminds me a bit of the plastic-ey tooth-clogging bits of popcorn.
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<)
In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away.
I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched.
I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
The US tendency toward gerontocracy is frustrating to me. Besides being out-of-touch, our federal officeholders being so old, as a group, feeds a self-fulfilling stereotype.
just look at all the doomposting, announcements of people leaving and companies disclosing that their chatbots totally could destroy the world! fear-based capitalism, as you put it.
It's a nice article and the animations are functional and aesthetically pleasing. I used to teach this on a whiteboard at my local community college. This is much slicker (and involves a lot less scribbling and erasing).
Spanning tree is an elegant protocol for the constraints it was invented under. Radia Perlman's poem-- particularly the last two stanzas-- also makes me very happy.
Aside: I enjoy the typographical error in the paragraph under the "Topology change notification" heading:
When a link fails, a connected fridge reachable...
Anecdote: During the pandemic I added washing my hands every time I get back to my office building (and specifically after interacting with surfaces the public interacts with) to my usual hand washing (after bathrooms and before eating, just like you). I keep a towel in my hand for any door handles between the restroom and my office door. Since doing this I feel like I've noticed fewer illnesses, too.
For me it's not the cost that bugs me when I don't have a part, but rather the disruption to my flow. If I can't get a project done all at once I'm much less likely to ever get it done.
I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.
We've been unspooling the stash of wood off-cuts, bits of copper pipe, and misc. broken or trash-picked parts from my late grandfather's workshop for the last few years. He always seemed to have materials at-hand to fix anything and, as a kid, I was in awe of that. Now I understand why.
I hope I can leave less stuff for my daughter to poke thru, but at the same time I want to be like my grandfather, seemingly being able to fix anything immediately.
My dad worked at Lockheed and in the 80s they joked they used JIC (just in case) manufacturing. They had so many parts without a clear reason as to why they created so many.
> I wish the old cables, gear, etc. I have squirreled-away stopped saving Customers' and friends' asses because I could feel good about getting rid of it.
What you've got to do is become more forgetful.
Ask not what a 17v power supply can do for your friends. Ask if you'll remember it and find it when that moment comes.
I share some genes with some squirrels and your grandfather.
I have two boxes for cables and power supplies. We have a couple of rental properties. In the garage I have boxes for plumbing parts, electrical parts, one for brackets, one with all kinds of fasteners, one for special tools. These are just small size moving type cardboard boxes, all on storage shelf. My helper laughs at why I keep all the junk, but he's the first to rummage through them when we need something. Everything somewhat organized enough that there's room to park the cars inside the garage.
They were. QA is paying Customers now.
Having your Customers, many of whom are locked-in to your products, do your QA beats the costs of paying testers.
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