Killer Micro Question

[Stephen Uitti]

In article <1990Nov14.154322.8894 at mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert at mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:
>In article <3849 at vela.acs.oakland.edu> tarcea at vela.acs.oakland.edu (Glenn Tarcea) writes:
>>
>>  I also find it interesting that IBM has decided to go with the clustering
>>concept for their mainframes. Although it seems to me it would be a lot
>>cheaper and better for the customer to buy 10 $30,000 workstations and
>>cluster them together, rather than 3 $22,000,000 mainframes (run yeck! MVS)
>>and cluster them together.
>
> Suppose you wanted a system to manage huge databases.  You needed strong
>integrity controls for concurrent database updates.  You needed to access the
>data in a huge room packed to the gills with disk drives.  You needed to be
>able to access the same data from any CPU in the system.  You couldn't
>tolerate the performance hit of the bottleneck caused by pumping all the data
>down an ethernet.
>
> You just might find the mainframes a better solution than the workstations.

I'm not convinced that the ethernet would be the bottleneck.  If it
were, the net could be partitioned.  If you can get the transaction
rates high enough for the individual machines, and if your data can
be partitioned properly, and if your plan allows easy expansion with
new nodes, the cost effectiveness of the workstations may give them
an edge.  I wouldn't use a million Commodore C64's, though.

You might find a single Connection Machine to be better than any
of the above.  If you have a single large application, a single
high-end wierd machine may be the answer.  A collection of
commodity disks on a CM can give you gigibytes of data access
with amazing bandwidth.  There is probably enough CPU for you too.

If you have hundreds of little jobs, I'd go with hundreds of smaller
processors.

> IBM didn't get that big by ignoring its customers' needs and
> forcing them to buy an excessively expensive and underperforming
> system.  Instead they carefully monitored those needs, and
> evolved their hardware and software to meet them.

I'm convinced that they got where they are mainly through
marketing - something I'd recommend to anyone with the bucks.

Stephen Uitti.
suitti at ima.isc.com

"We Americans want peace, and it is now evident that we must be prepared to
demand it.  For other peoples have wanted peace, and the peace they
received was the peace of death." - the Most Rev. Francis J. Spellman,
Archbishop of New York.  22 September, 1940