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Conference smurf::ase

Title:ase
Moderator:SMURF::GROSSO
Created:Thu Jul 29 1993
Last Modified:Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:2114
Total number of notes:7347

2107.0. "sun vs. TruCluster" by RTOMS::PARETIJ () Tue Jun 03 1997 12:00

can anyone comment on this, e.g. :

- is solaris mc the current offering ?
 http://www.sunlabs.com/research/solaris-mc/

- do they have a cluster file system

- how does the availability function compare with TruCluster

- do they have a high performance, low latency interconnect like MC
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name		DateLines
2107.1SOme answersnamix.fno.dec.com::jptFIS and ChipsTue Jun 03 1997 12:5153
- is solaris mc the current offering ?

	Nope, Solaris-MC is research project, and some components of
	that research have been introduced in Solaris operating system
	already (like zero copy I/O subsystem).

- do they have a cluster file system

	Not yet, but they're working on it.

- how does the availability function compare with TruCluster

	Would require much longer explanation, but in short, they lack
	tightly integrated packaging like TruCluster with all components
	we have. They kind of build pretty similar offering from smaller
	loosly integrated components.

	Based on customer feedback, Sun is still behind us in terms
	of manageability, recovery times and overall reliability.

- do they have a high performance, low latency interconnect like MC

	Everything is so relative. Sun hypes currently SCI technology
	(Scalable Coherent Interface) from Dolphin. SCI is optical
	1Gbit/sec.

	Ffrom end customer side the SCI has been seen as HPC/Super Computer
	solution this far, but Dolphin is working hard to get this 
	IEEE/ANSI standard interface to get wider acceptance. Customers
	like CERN can tell more about SCI strenghts and weaknesses. 

	Btw: SCI is not optical/serial only (1Gbit/sec), there is also
	copper/parallel interface which is more impressive with 1Gbyte/sec.

	I'm not sure about latencies current shipping products can really
	deliver, but I have heard statements that SCI could do about
	4us in shared memory model with existing products in user 
	"user space-to-user space" transactions. Real life bandwith
	that has been demonstrated with Sun/SBus based SCI has been 
	30-40MB/s.

	http://sunshine.cern.ch:8080/testenv.html ha ssome info on 
	CERN's real life test environment they have run. 

	http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/research/sci/index.html has "University
	View" of some things on Sun platforms.

	Enjoy,

		-jari
2107.2An OS for NUMA?HERON::BLOMBERGTrapped inside the universeTue Jun 03 1997 13:0914
    
            Hi Joseph.
    
            Concerning interconnects, Sun Enterprise series has a
            NUMA-like interconnect called Gigaplane-XB with what they
            say "up to 12.8 Gbytes/s ... less than 500 nanosec constant
            latency".
    
            I believe Solaris MC is an attempt to make more efficient use
            of their NUMA-like hardware architecture.
    
    Cheers,
    Ake
2107.3Full MoonNNTPD::"cherkus@buff.zk3.dec.com"Dave CherkusTue Jun 03 1997 13:2416
Sun calls their cluster project 'Full Moon'.  For their marketing
hype, see:

http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayArchives.pl?970313.emoon.htm

I suggest you load http://www.infoworld.com/ and hit the search
button on the banner on the top and search on sun full moon cluster
and you will get a dozen or more articles to read.

PS: they seem to be behind us for now.  They have a two-node ASE
like environment now and claim 4 node sometime this year and are 
claim 8 nodes and a clustered file system sometime in 1998.

Dave

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