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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 s

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.

toast0 3d ago
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.
- convolvatron 3d ago
  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.

toast0 3d ago

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.

convolvatron 3d ago
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.