Clustering let down by hardware

DON BECKER, the co-founder of the clustering software firm Beowulf, has practically given up on ever getting it to go a hundred per cent.

According to SearchOpenSource.com, Becker is working jolly hard to improve booting and provisioning options in Beowulf. But he moans about inevitability of hardware administration headaches because there is always some idiot making new hardware.

He says it is impossible for software to be 100 percent because just about every month there is some changed device, or you can't even get the chip, or there's a new, higher-performance I/O chip that's embedded in the system.

Becker said that will never go away, and imagining that virtualisation will make it go away is a mistake.

He said that punters hoping for silver bullets like virtualisation to make the booting, provisioning or device driver compatibility issues go away are going to be disappointed.

Yep, it is all thoroughly pointless. We have all had days like that, maybe searchopensource should have spoken to him when he was feeling a little more perky.

More doom and gloom here. µ