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Running the Internet - All of It - on GNU/Linux
Published 19:51, 06 February 08
Everyone knows that Google uses hundreds of thousands of commodity PCs running GNU/Linux to power its services. Well, IBM wants to go one further: running everything - the entire Internet, for example - on an Blue Gene/P supercomputer running GNU/Linux:
In this paper we described the vision and exploration of Project Kittyhawk, an ongoing effort at IBM Research which explores the construction of a next-generation compute platform capable of simultaneously hosting many web-scale workloads. At scales of potentially millions of connected computers, efficient provisioning, powering, cooling, and management are paramount.
……
To test our hypothesis, we are prototyping a stack consisting of a network-enabled firmware layer to bootstrap nodes, the L4 hypervisor for partitioning and security enforcement, Linux as a standard operating system, and an efficient software packaging and provisioning system.
An important aspect is that while these building blocks allow us to run a large variety of standard workloads, none of these components are required and therefore can be replaced as necessary to accommodate many diverse workloads. This flexibility, efficiency, and unprecedented scale makes Blue Gene a powerhouse for running computation at Internet scale.
(Via The Reg.)
Posted by Glyn Moody at 5:03 PM
Michael Geist on a Misleading Microsoft
The Hill Times this week includes an astonishingly misleading and factually incorrect article on Canadian copyright written by Microsoft.
So says Canadian copyright crusader Michael Geist.
Why is that interesting? Because it shows that Microsoft regards copyright as within its purview. Which also indicates why people in the open source world need to stand up for copyright rights around the world: it's all connected.
Posted by Glyn Moody at 3:37 PM
Originally posted at Open... This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. Please link back to the original post.
Now read Glyn Moody’s Open Enterprise blog
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