Single System Image

[MotionBlur]

Based on my research on Single System Image distributions, it seems these are dead in favor of a cloud environment?

I always thought it was neat with my Silicon Graphics Origin 300s to be able to have a single install of IRIX (i.e. one hard drive for 8 2U Origin 300s), connect all of them to a NUMAlink router and be able to execute tasks spread over all 32 MIPS cpus/32gb of ram.

I know SGI's had a combination of their NUMAlink (based on Cray's work) in conjunction with their IRIX OS, but anyone else feel like it would be neat to link up 2 or more latest generation AMD/Intel systems via Infiniband and have the same functionality?

In the end I can see the potential futility in the time spent getting this working considering some (possibly a lot of) tasks could simply be written in OpenCL/CUDA and then thrown on a CrossFire/SLI setup with multiple GPUs.

 

[cyclone3d]

Have you looked into making a Beowulf Cluster?

 

[LightningCrash]

SGI is still making supercomputers with SSIs, but you're right, they've gone largely by the wayside.

If you're doing it with less than a 7 figure budget then I would definitely opt for other methods.

 

[FLECOM]

IBM did something similar with some of their higher end X series servers

 

[LightningCrash]

IBM did something similar with some of their higher end X series servers

Are your referring to the EXT QPI link?

 

[Alembic5]

Perhaps the scalable partition boxes... I worked with the x3950's a few years back. You could stack up to 8 of them together with these huge interconnect cables and have a single OS see the sum of the entire group. They were quad socket quad core boxes with 64GB RAM in our install. They worked pretty well, and ran a good 6 or 7 years before we decommissioned them.