On Thu, 25 Sep 2008, Robert G. Brown wrote: > Ugly vs pretty is irrelevant. The data is clearly and cleanly > organized, easy to extract and put into structures, capable of dealing > with the natural variability of hardware configuration on the sending > side -- multiple interfaces, CPUs all handled consistently and > automagically, no aggregation or overloading because they suddenly > invented dual or quad CPUs.
Ahh, but that's part of thinking carefully about the design up front (or perhaps for the Nth version), rather than reporting values because they are around and might be useful someday. When we have one or two CPUs we probably want to report and observe the stats for each processor independently. After all, there is an important difference between one saturated processor with the second idle, and both processors sorta' busy. But that rule doesn't continue when we move to higher core counts. We still want a little observability, but a number for each of a zillion cores is useless. Perhaps worse than useless, because each tool has to make its own decision about how to summarize the values before using them. A better solution is to have the reporting side summarize the values. Again the problem with XML and other extensible systems is that people use the flexibility to avoid thoughtful design. Sure, it's obvious how to just add a few more records when we go from two to four core per socket. And reporting system won't obviously break when we have 64 cores in each of 4 sockets. But it really just shifts the re-design work to the tools and applications. -- Donald Becker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Penguin Computing / Scyld Software www.penguincomputing.com www.scyld.com Annapolis MD and San Francisco CA _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
