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Mansa Musa was the ruler of the Mali Empire in West Africa. Details recorded here should be sourced; unknown information is left blank.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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A VMScluster, originally known as a VAXcluster, is a computer cluster involving a group of computers running the OpenVMS operating system. Whereas tightly coupled multiprocessor systems run a single copy of the operating system, a VMScluster is loosely coupled: each machine runs its own copy of OpenVMS, but the disk storage, lock manager, and security domain are all cluster-wide, providing a single system image abstraction. Machines can join or leave a VMScluster without affecting the rest of the cluster. For enhanced availability, VMSclusters support the use of dual-ported disks connected to two machines or storage controllers simultaneously.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) first announced VAXclusters in May 1983. At that stage, clustering required specialised communications hardware, as well as some major changes to low-level subsystems in the VMS operating system. The software and hardware were designed jointly. VAXcluster support was first added in VAX/VMS V4.0, which was released in 1984. This version only supported clustering over DEC's proprietary Computer Interconnect (CI).
At the center of each cluster was a star coupler, to which every node (computer) and data storage device in the cluster was connected by one or two pairs of CI cables. Each pair of cables had a transmission rate of 70 megabits per second, a high speed for that era. Using two pairs gave an aggregate transmission rate of 140 megabits per second, with redundancy in case one cable failed; the star couplers also had redundant wiring for better availability.
Each CI cable connected to its computer via a CI Port, which could send and receive packets without any CPU involvement. To send a packet, a CPU had only to create a small data structure in memory and append it to a "send" queue; similarly, the CI Port would append each incoming message to a "receive" queue. Tests showed that a VAX-11/780 could send and receive 3000 messages per second, even though it was nominally a 1-MIPS machine. The closely related Mass Storage Control Protocol (MSCP) allowed similarly high performance from the mass storage subsystem. In addition, MSCP packets were easily transported over the CI allowing remote access to storage devices.
VAXclustering was an early clustering system to achieve commercial success (along with AT&T, Tandem Computers,[1][2] and Stratus Computers[3]), and was a major selling point for VAX systems.
DEC's MicroVAX minicomputer was incapable of VAXclustering at first.[4] In 1986, DEC added VAXclustering support to it, running over Ethernet instead of special-purpose hardware. While not giving the high-availability advantages of the CI hardware, these Local Area VAXclusters (LAVc) provided an attractive expansion path for buyers of low-end minicomputers. LAVc also allowed diskless satellite nodes to bootstrap over the network using the system disk of a bootnode.
Later versions of OpenVMS (V5.0 and later) supported "mixed interconnect" VAXclusters (using both CI and Ethernet), and VAXclustering over DSSI (Digital Systems and Storage Interconnect), SCSI and FDDI, among other transports. Eventually, as high-bandwidth wide area networking became available, clustering was extended to allow satellite data links and long-distance terrestrial links. This allowed the creation of disaster-tolerant clusters; by locating the single VAXcluster in several diverse geographical areas, the cluster could survive infrastructure failures and natural disasters.
VAXclustering was greatly aided by the introduction of terminal servers using the LAT protocol. By allowing ordinary serial terminals to access the host nodes via Ethernet, it became possible for any terminal to rapidly and easily connect to any host node. This made it much simpler to accomplish fail over of the user terminals from one node of the cluster to another.
Support for clustering over TCP/IP was added in OpenVMS version 8.4, which was released in 2010. With Gigabit Ethernet now common and 10 Gigabit Ethernet being introduced, standard networking cables and cards are quite sufficient to support VMSclustering.
OpenVMS supports up to 96 nodes in a single cluster, and allows mixed-architecture clusters, where VAX and Alpha systems, or Alpha and Itanium systems can co-exist in a single cluster (Various organizations have demonstrated triple-architecture clusters and cluster configurations with up to 150 nodes, but these configurations are not officially supported).
Unlike many other clustering solutions, VMScluster offers transparent and fully distributed read-write with record-level locking, which means that the same disk and even the same file can be accessed by several cluster nodes at once; the locking occurs only at the level of a single record of a file, which would usually be one line of text or a single record in a database. This allows the construction of high-availability multiply redundant database servers.
Cluster connections can span upwards of 500 miles (800 km), allowing member nodes to be located in different buildings on an office campus, or in different cities.
Host-based volume shadowing allows volumes (of the same or of different sizes) to be shadowed (mirrored) across multiple controllers and multiple hosts, allowing the construction of disaster-tolerant environments.
Full access into the distributed lock manager (DLM) is available to application programmers, and this allows applications to coordinate arbitrary resources and activities across all cluster nodes. This includes file-level coordination, but the resources and activities and operations that can be coordinated with the DLM are completely arbitrary.
With the supported capability of rolling upgrades and multiple system disks, cluster configurations can be maintained on-line and upgraded incrementally. This allows cluster configurations to continue to provide application and data access while a subset of the member nodes are upgraded to newer software versions.[5][6] Cluster uptimes are frequently measured in years with the current longest uptime being at least sixteen years.[7]
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A VMScluster, originally known as a VAXcluster, is a computer cluster involving a group of computers running the OpenVMS operating system. Whereas tightly coupled multiprocessor systems run a single copy of the operating system, a VMScluster is loosely coupled: each machine runs its own copy of OpenVMS, but the disk storage, lock manager, and security domain are all cluster-wide, providing a single system image abstraction. Machines can join or leave a VMScluster without affecting the rest of the cluster. For enhanced availability, VMSclusters support the use of dual-ported disks connected to two machines or storage controllers simultaneously.
The history of computer clusters is best captured by a footnote in Greg Pfister's In Search of Clusters: "Virtually every press release from DEC mentioning clusters says 'DEC, who invented clusters...'. IBM did not invent them either. Customers invented clusters, as soon as they could not fit all their work on one computer, or needed a backup. The date of the first is unknown, but it would be surprising if it was not in the 1960s, or even late 1950s." The formal engineering basis of cluster computing as a means of doing parallel work of any sort was arguably invented by Gene Amdahl of IBM, who in 1967 published what has come to be regarded as the seminal paper on parallel processing: Amdahl's Law. Amdahl's Law describes mathematically the speedup one can expect from parallelizing any given otherwise serially performed task on a parallel architecture. This article defined the engineering basis for both multiprocessor computing and cluster computing, where the primary differentiator is whether or not the interprocessor communications are supported "inside" the computer (on for example a customized internal communications bus or network) or "outside" the computer on a commodity network. Consequently, the history of early computer clusters is more or less directly tied into the history of early networks, as one of the primary motivations for the development of a network was to link computing resources, creating a de facto computer cluster. Packet switching networks were conceptually invented by the RAND corporation in 1962. Using the concept of a packet switched network, the ARPANET project succeeded in creating in 1969 what was arguably the world's first commodity-network based computer cluster by linking four different computer centers (each of which was something of a "cluster" in its own right, but probably not a commodity cluster). The ARPANET project grew into the Internet—which can be thought of as "the mother of all computer clusters" (as the union of nearly all of the compute resources, including clusters, that happen to be connected). It also established the paradigm in use by all computer clusters in the world today—the use of packet-switched networks to perform interprocessor communications between processor (sets) located in otherwise disconnected frames. The development of customer-built and research clusters proceeded hand in hand with that of both networks and the Unix operating system from the early 1970s, as both TCP/IP and the Xerox PARC project created and formalized protocols for network-based communications. The Hydra operating system was built for a cluster of DEC PDP-11 minicomputers called C.mmp at Carnegie Mellon University in 1971. However, it was not until circa 1983 that the protocols and tools for easily doing remote job distribution and file sharing were defined (largely within the context of BSD Unix, as implemented by Sun Microsystems) and hence became generally available commercially, along with a shared filesystem. The first commercial clustering product was ARCnet, developed by Datapoint in 1977. ARCnet was not a commercial success and clustering per se did not really take off until Digital Equipment Corporation released their VAXcluster product in 1984 for the VAX/VMS operating system. The ARCnet and VAXcluster products not only supported parallel computing, but also shared file systems and peripheral devices. The idea was to provide the advantages of parallel processing, while maintaining data reliability and uniqueness. VAXcluster, now VMScluster, is still available on OpenVMS running on Alpha, Itanium and x86-64 systems. Two other noteworthy early commercial clusters were the Tandem Himalaya (a circa 1994 high-availability product) and the IBM S/390 Parallel Sysplex (also circa 1994, primarily for business use). No history of commodity computer clusters would be complete without noting the pivotal role played by the development of Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) software in 1989. This open source software based on TCP/IP communications enabled the instant creation of a virtual supercomputer—a high performance compute cluster—made out of any TCP/IP connected systems. Free-form heterogeneous clusters built on top of this model rapidly achieved total throughput in FLOPS that greatly exceeded that available even with the most expensive "big iron" supercomputers. PVM and the advent of inexpensive networked PCs led, in 1993, to a NASA project to build supercomputers out of commodity clusters. In 1995 the Beowulf cluster—a cluster built on top of a commodity network for the specific purpose of "being a supercomputer" capable of performing tightly coupled parallel HPC computations—was invented, which spurred the independent development of grid computing as a named entity, although Grid-style clustering had been around at least as long as the Unix operating system and the Arpanet, whether or not it, or the clusters that used it, were named.
A distributed lock manager (DLM) runs in every machine in a cluster, with an identical copy of a cluster-wide lock database. Operating systems use lock managers to organise and serialise the access to resources. In this way a DLM provides software applications which are distributed across a cluster on multiple machines with a means to synchronize their accesses to shared resources. DLMs have been used as the foundation for several successful clustered file systems, in which the machines in a cluster can use each other's storage via a unified file system, with significant advantages for performance and availability. The main performance benefit comes from solving the problem of disk cache coherency between participating computers. The DLM is used not only for file locking but also for coordination of all disk access. VMScluster, the first clustering system to come into widespread use, relied on the OpenVMS DLM in just this way.
The Mass Storage Control Protocol (MSCP) is a protocol that was designed by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts for the purposes of controlling their high-end mass storage options. First implemented in the HSC50 hierarchical storage controller, the protocol quickly spread throughout the entire line of mass storage controllers built by DEC. The UDA50 is an implementation of MSCP built on a Unibus card; other implementations (for example, the RQDX) stretch down to the Q-bus and small, 5 megabyte disk drives and even diskettes. Designed to minimize the amount of CPU involvement, the protocol depends upon two queues. Into one queue are placed packets which fully describe the commands to be executed by the mass storage subsystem. To initiate an I/O request, the CPU has only to create a small data structure in memory, append it to a "send" queue, and if that is the first packet in the send queue, wake the MSCP controller. After the command has been executed, an appropriate status packet is placed into the second queue to be read by the CPU. Interrupts to the CPU (a costly operation) are not needed so long as further command packets remain in the command queue and the response queue is not in danger of over-flowing. I/O-space reads and writes to the MSCP controller, a less-expensive but still-costly operation, are similarly minimized. Because MSCP packets were deliberately designed to resemble the packets exchanged on the VMScluster interconnects, it is a very inexpensive operation to ship storage requests around a VMScluster for remote execution; this greatly facilitates the creation of large-scale VMSclusters. The dependence upon in-memory packets and the minimization of interrupts and I/O-space reads and writes greatly facilitates remote operations.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Shirley Chisholm, elected in 1968.
