Beowulf clusters

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 14 January 2013 02:46, Mark Janssen <dreamingforward at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 8:37 PM, Oscar Benjamin
> <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 14 January 2013 02:33, Mark Janssen <dreamingforward at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Lol, well that's why I'm asking.  I don't see how they can do it
>>> without considerable difficulties.
>>
>> What do you want the GIL for across machines? The normal purpose of
>> the GIL is to preserve the integrity of Python's in-memory data
>> structures. These are only accessible within one process so what good
>> would a multi-process GIL be?
>
> Excuse me, I actually thought you knew what you were talking about.

Steady on...

> A Beowulf cluster, by it's nature, is across many-machines.  Now you
> can't have a GIL and a single python program across many-machines
> without some tricks.  I'm just wondering how (or if) they solved that
> problem....

You've used the word 'program'. I used the word 'process'. I have used
HPC clusters that I assume count as Beowulf clusters. However, I have
never used them in such a way that a single process occurred on
multiple machines (the idea seems absurd to me). Maybe I've missed
something here...


Oscar