I'm actually confused about what ClusterdOS is and does besides glue a bunch of projects together in an opinionated way.
It sits on top of Kubernetes and seems very hand wavy about how you create and manage those clusters.
Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
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Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#22I’m not sure quite what this is trying to say. My laptop is already a personal cluster — it has 16 cores, lots of storage, a fast network, I run VMs on it. It’s been the case for a long time that you can run bursty jobs in the cloud if you need more power for a brief period than whatever is currently locally affordable. That’s kind of what the cloud is for, really. So what’s new?
It’s pretty fun to throw a thousand cores at a problem, but I guess it won’t be that long before you can get that in two-socket AMD workstation or whatever.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#23Clusters are almost never the right answer for most problems: https://yourdatafitsinram.net/
Most data problems don't need to fit in RAM.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#24The article assumes there are people who want clusters. But a single Linux VM in the cloud can scale pretty far. Separate VM's for different apps works well for isolation. Why do I need a cluster?
Isn't there a meaningful sense in which "separate VMs for different apps" constitutes a cluster? The "cooperative task" they're engaged in is just, broadly, meeting your needs, whatever they are. The isolation is a desirable property, and I agree this is much preferable to a highly inter-coupled bunch of machines, and also that thia stretches the typical sense in which we refer to a "compute cluster", but I don't thi…
> Isn't there a meaningful sense in which "separate VMs for different apps" constitutes a cluster?
Not really. In my experience clustering implies multiple compute elements serving the same function with a coordination mechanism to provide redundancy and/or enhanced capacity.
JBOD vs. RAID.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#25I'm actually confused about what ClusterdOS is and does besides glue a bunch of projects together in an opinionated way. It sits on top of Kubernetes and seems very hand wavy about how you create and manage those clusters.
As far as I can tell and from some quick researching of the guys previous experience, that's all it is. I think the implication is that LLM's will be architecting and deploying the cluster setups at some point? Which sounds horrific so I'm assuming I am interpreting it long
The article itself reminds me of the enthusiasm I felt for plan9 when I first heard about it back in uni. I also thought everyone should have their own compute grids and that clustered computing was the future; of course now I realize there's a lot of reasons why that doesn't actually work. Considering this appears to be a start-up ad, I hope the author knows something I don't.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#26Clusters are almost never the right answer for most problems: https://yourdatafitsinram.net/
You're drawing an incorrect conclusion from that site. Aside from the fact that "fitting in RAM" is not the only criterion for needing a cluster, the fact that it's possible to fit data into RAM on a single machine doesn't mean that's the most cost-effective, practical, or sensible solution.
A big advantage of clusters, and horizontal scaling in general, is the ability to easily dynamically scale to meet demand.
If you're running a system on a single machine that has N GB of memory and you need to scale to N+1, what do you do? Provision a new machine and migrate everything over?
No-one operates online real-time systems like this. Clusters make it much easier and less expensive to handle this.
On top of that, it's probably true that in some pure numerical problem-count sense, "most problems" don't need a cluster, but that's misleading. It's like saying "most businesses are mom-and-pop shops." Perhaps true, but it ignores hundreds of thousands of larger businesses, or even small business that have big data needs.
There are plenty of problems that involve large amounts of data, and that's increasingly true with ML applications.
I'm at a company of ~100 people which you've probably never heard of (classified as a "small" company in government stats, so not included in the hundreds of thousands figure I mentioned above.) We have 1.9 PB of data for our main environment. When we run processes that deal with it all, the clusters scale to thousands of vCPUs and tens of terabytes of RAM.
Several processes that run daily scale to 500+ vCPUs and many TB of RAM. For the latter, the data itself could probably fit in RAM on a humongous machine, but the CPUs wouldn't fit on a single machine. And we'd have to size the machines carefully every time we start them up. Clusters can scale up dynamically according to the demands of the jobs they're executing.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#27I don't see how an operating system can work for a cluster. You can have more than one CPU and more than one storage connected to one mainboard and that works because the interconnect fabric is very fast. We don't have have the possibility to connect different computers at the same kind of speed that would let them work together seamlessly.
One could argue that multiple cores are already not seamless especially if you have NUMA (now available in high-end desktops by the way! and every multi-socket system that's ever existed) and the distinction between RAM and disk is very not seamless and so is any other number of things you'd hope the OS would magically handwave away for you but it doesn't.
10Gbps is now very cheap and 100Gbps is viable at hobby scale. That's Ethernet. I don't know anything about CXL and so on.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#28I'm actually confused about what ClusterdOS is and does besides glue a bunch of projects together in an opinionated way. It sits on top of Kubernetes and seems very hand wavy about how you create and manage those clusters.
As far as I can tell and from some quick researching of the guys previous experience, that's all it is. I think the implication is that LLM's will be architecting and deploying the cluster setups at some point? Which sounds horrific so I'm assuming I am interpreting it long The article itself reminds me of the enthusiasm I felt for plan9 when I first heard about it back in uni. I also thought everyone should have the…
Claude Code + Ansible + whatever stuff needs to be managed gives some visibility and control and in my experience is reliable enough to be useful.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#29Does anyone now what is the font used in the article? I like ut a lot.
Re: Clusters become personal (like PCs did)
#30The article assumes there are people who want clusters. But a single Linux VM in the cloud can scale pretty far. Separate VM's for different apps works well for isolation. Why do I need a cluster?
Never understood the appeal of Kubernetes to developers, outside of a massive deployments. Always felt like a poor man's Linux for those that insist on using apple or windows desktop.
I am not sure I understand this argument. Kubernetes typically runs on Linux. I use an Apple laptop, work mostly with headless Linux VMs and Kubernetes. What is a “poor man’s Linux”?