If I Had a Billion, Part 5

[jeff_duntemann]

(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13, 2007 entry.) A gratifying number of people who wrote to me indicated that they would fund research, in a lot of different areas. I'm for that; research is much less political than education, and much more can be done with less money. (Even a billion

Comments

[regek]

There's already a chip that lends itself extremely well to virtualization. In fact, on the currently shipping hardware using this chip, you can't run any native code. Everything is run through a hypervisor built into the firmware.

There's a single management processor that is responsible for starting the rest of the hardware and monitoring it. It runs on a scaled-down version of that same chip and boots a flash-based Linux system.

For that matter, the operating system that runs on this hardware now has a binary compatibility layer that lets it run ELFs compiled for x86 Linux.

It's called the P-series from IBM. ;-) They're extremely good at virtualization at this point. Rather than specifying "I want this code to run on one processor and this code to run on another two and this to run on a fourth", you specify how much time each task should be able to request from the system as a whole. The hypervisor then balances it across all of the hardware in the box. Works very well. Not quite as fault-tolerant as a NonStop, but it's pretty close and it doesn't cost nearly as much money.