360 longevity, was RISCs too close to hardware

precursor to beowolf:

i had a running argument at acm sigops (90?, 91?, the one where they had the evening event at the monterey acquarium) with somebody (who was at dec at the time and involved with dec cluster) about ha-cmp being able to do scaleable computing with commodity cluster systems. random ha-cmp stuff

in an earlier life, my wife had gotten con'ed into doing a stint in pok in charge of loosely-coupled architecture (aka mainframe for clusters). she had done peer-coupled shared data architecture

but in that period almost all the attention was on bigger and faster iron (uniprocessors and SMPs) ... and not a lot given to clustering.

i was involved in supporting and driving hone complex ... both from the standpoint of writing smp kernel support as well as cluster support. circa '79, '80 , hone had possibly deployed the largest single-system image cluster around

a couple recent post on scalleable dlm:

note that GRID is somewhat the evolution of that ... and moving into the commercial space ... some of it can be viewed as time-sharing appplied to clustering .... misc. old time-sharing postings

for total topic drift ... in this list, there is a talk I gave at last summer's global grid forum: https:--forge.gridforum.org-docman2-ViewCategory.php?groupid=42&categoryid=721

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