Personally I think that there is a significant market for Nix, not in HPC,
but as a better, more distributed hypervisor. With Broadcom mismanaging
VMWare, there is a need for something better than ESXI, Hyper-V or Proxmox
for all the enterprises that aren't 100% on the cloud (which is pretty much
all of them) and for the CSPs themselves too. Something built for a system
that resembles a modern data center, not a single desktop. Managing
workloads across many machines at scale is what makes the cloud work and
will remain a healthy industry for years. I think that a Plan9 could be
used to scrape together resources from multiple, underutilized machines in
the same data center to run applications with tolerance for some latency
and drive up utilization from the current 17% or so norm. If you get above
25% utilization for an existing data center, you would be saving millions
of dollars and avoiding the need to build more at tremendous cost.
On Fri, Dec 27, 2024 at 11:44 PM Ron Minnich <rminn...@p9f.org> wrote:
> all that said, my offer stands: I'd love to help anyone interested to
> bring nix back to life. I'd most prefer to do so on 9front, but I'm
> not picky.
>
> ron
>
> On Fri, Dec 27, 2024 at 8:18 PM Anthony Sorace <a...@9srv.net> wrote:
> >
> > I've thought for a while now that NIX might still have interesting
> things to say in the middle of the space, even if the HPC origins didn't
> work out. Probably most of us are walking around with systems with
> asymmetrical cores ("performance" vs. "efficiency") in our pockets right
> now; it seems like there's lots of space to explore *how* differently to
> manage these cores (as opposed to just spinning them up or not when needed
> but treating them as "regular").
> >
> > I think it's a good idea. But...
> >
> > > On Dec 27, 2024, at 08:32, Paul Lalonde <paul.a.lalo...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > There is very little compute that's "cpu-limited" at multi-second
> scales that can't benefit from these approaches, hence the death of non-GPU
> supercomputing.
> >
> > This is really good framing... even if it's bad for my idea. 🤣 "Compute
> that's "cpu-limited" at multi-second scales" really cuts out most
> applications at modern scale. Plenty of things like pro workflows, but the
> higher up you move there, the more likely you're pushing to GPUs anyway. I
> think the window isn't 0, but it's shrunk quite a bit.
------------------------------------------
9fans: 9fans
Permalink:
https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T7692a612f26c8ec5-M69cb4cbf5ad0abede5c48239
Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
