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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

It's a single system image [1] platform built with Linux. The main idea being that the OS is running on multiple computers while presenting a single computer abstraction to the other software running on it. You write your program as though it's running on a monolithic machine, and the SSI platform manages it across multiple distributed machines.

The concept is more popular in HPC & scientific computing than it is in mainstream IT.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image

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You know, this is a great, clear description that they should definitely put on their homepage.

Great explanation; I can't stop watching the teaser http://popcornlinux.org/sources/video/sosp-19-tutorial.mp4

This is off topic, but it's proving hard to google. What's the significance of the hand gesture the women in the video makes at 1:13 and again at 1:39?

looks like that clip of her is looped, so it might just be a random hand movement that looks meaningful bc you see it twice

wow, i sure feel dumb about this now! thank you, sibling commenters who actually know stuff :)

It is a prevalent hand gesture in the Indian subcontinent. Could mean a lot of things, and interpreted along with the facial expression. In this case, it means "That's pretty cool", looking at her facial expressions.

It could mean "What the heck is going on?", when accompanied with a different facial expression.

Exactly the same in Italy. Weird, that.

It means "wow, impressive".

Surprisingly, as an Italian, I know exactly what this means: “wonderful, amazing, perfect”.

as an Italian, I understand this as "to steal"

I’d denote stealing with my palm facing downwards.

I actually had to try it out in real life... I can’t think of gesticulating in the abstract.

Seems like you can take the Italian out of Italy but not Italy out of the Italian.

Sounds a bit like a Beowulf Linux cluster from about 20y ago. What's the major difference between the approach of those.

Beowulf was just the idea of making a cluster of cheap commodity hardware using open software, typically not Single System Image.

Yeah I was thinking this sounds more like MOSIX, but with the added abstraction to handle executing the same code accross different architectures.

http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/txt_about.html

Indeed, MOSIX or Kerrighed http://www.kerrighed.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Beowulf had no shared memory abstraction, programs had to be written using message passing, e.g. MPI.

I'm not convinced a shared memory abstraction is a good thing for distribution across machines. Some Beowulf clusters actually had much lower latency interconnects than ethernet, e.g. Quadrics, but we still needed to carefully optimise the traffic. With a shared memory abstraction, such optimisation is out of our hands.

Ah! I've been saying we should do this for years now. Everyone in the cloud space is reinventing the wheel when what we need is a cloud OS that abstracts away multiple computers. I can see a bright future for a project like this.

I can't find it but that sounds like the model a platform company that works with CCP to host EVE online makes. They program one game but they shard different sectors of the universe out to hardware based on demand.

They either host it or it was just a tech demo they did with eve online. Wish I could remember it was a super cool job advert, not my skill set though.

In mainstream IT, you'd usually set up a Hadoop or Spark cluster on the machines and then write your code to run against one of those. What's the advantage of this approach over those?

Automatic vertical scaling without changing applications. One needs to rewrite apps in order to get the advantages of Hadoop/Spark/MapReduce in general, and not all problems are solved by simply doing that.. It is a different thing/paradigm, really

Does this mean I can expand my thinkpad with one or more raspberry pi boards?

aka Linux Cluster. This was very popular concept about 15yrs ago. I have seen telecom servers run in such kind of clusters

Are you referring to servers running OTP (erlang)?

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