# Presentation: 098133

## 
March, 2003

**March, 2003**

**SOS 7****Jim Harrell*****Unlimited Scale Inc.***

## The Good The BadThe Future

## The Good The BadThe Future

**Good things are unimportant.**
**Bad things should be fixed.**
**The Future is what you make of it.**
**Ron asked for Opinions...**

## Introduction

**Everything begins and ends with the hardware and applications**
**System Software is just glue – it is nothing by itself**
**My background **
**System Software projects all the hardware capabilities to applications in a easy to use well understood fashion**
**System Services – HSM, etc. must be out of the way...**
**Systems have to be up to be used**
**One system is better than 10 thousand**

## Good

**Processors are cheap and fast**
**Peak speeds are like gas mileage projections**
**Hot – and poorly cooled**
**Complex – additions not always useful**
**Driven out specialized processors and software**
**Fewer choices – used to be more processors than companies...**
**Memory is cheap**
**Larger memory is traded off for expensive and fast**
**Interconnects exist**
**Just implemented as I/O devices**
**I/O channel speeds are as fast as HPC systems 10 years ago**
**More than 10x cheaper**
**Striping data can extend across nodes**

## The Good

**Unix is the OS of choice**
**20+ years of dominating delivered systems in HPTC **
**Software system research is irrelevant – (Rob Pike) **
**Linux is Unix **
**Recognizable at source level**
**Only Unix for IA32**
**Java is programming**
**MPPs are gone**
**Commodity pressure on engineering costs**
**Late generation MPPs had single process space and single filename space – this should be salvaged**
**We have clusters**
**This is good – expect small smps for the foreseeable future**
**Multi-threading is hard and all components have to be threaded..**

## The Bad

**Operating System development and checkout should not be done in public**
**New systems and larger systems always provide surprises**
**Onsite integration of what ought to be compatible equipment is often hard to do..**
**Traditionally large systems need to be shipped and require some work onsite**

## The Bad

**I/O and filesystems don’t work well enough**
**MPP model of data delivery requires high speed interconnect**
**Years of MPPs have reduced the expectations for I/O performance**
**Expectations appear to be for large sequential I/O **
**Clusters have to share data using software – this becomes a difficult filesystem issue**
**Need  global filename spaces and reasonable performance**
**Cluster filesystems may be only part of the answer.**
**Quorum is a Latin word. Latin is a dead language.**

## The Bad

**Complexity ...**
**The level of complexity is too high for applications**
**MPI has a high learning curve and looks like a protocol**
**Specialization and growth can create distance - **

## The Future

**Heterogeneous processors – in a single system**
**Use processors for the work suited to the capabilities**
**Apply specialized cpus, PIMM, FPGA, etc. to application work **
**Support with commodity processors **
**Interconnects built as interconnects - not I/O devices**
**Distributed system software instead of cluster service software**
**Single systems – single process space, global resource management, and single filename space systems**
**CoArray Fortran, upc, etc. – move towards integrating parallelism in programming environments**
**Cycle of commodity dominance has not peaked – but will**