Re: Lets get this right (WAS RE:MOSIX and kernel mods)

Pavel Machek (pavel@bug.ucw.cz)
Sun, 7 Mar 1999 13:09:49 +0100


Hi!

> : No, just the person I responded to. He made an emotional appeal based
> : on some kind of glorious fight against mediocrity.
>
> Yes, and you made an emotional appeal, also not backed up with any facts,
> for some features that are of very questionable usefulness. Based on my
> own direct experience with DSM, as well as having reviewed multiple DSM
> papers, including a Stanford PhD thesis, and having read piles of other
> DSM papers, and having worked on applications which actually use DSM,
> I concur with the conclusion that the former person made: DSM sucks.
>
> And it isn't an emotional thing at all, it's simply that it doesn't work
> for any real applications. Any application which can withstand the
> latencies introduced by DSM can typically be trivially rewritten to
> use MPI or PVM intrerfaces to accomplish the same thing, usually with
> higher performance.

Ok, so you admit there are few cases where DSM is usefull. It can be
trivially rewritten, but trivially rewriting is additional work so DSM
can be usefull if you are lazy. I believe this was the case the other
guy was talking about. (If app is big enough, "trivial reritting" can
easily take you 2 days, don't you think so?)

Pavel

-- 
I'm really pavel@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz. 	   Pavel
Look at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/ ;-).

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