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In the year 2010 this must still be managed by the application (distributed processing where chunks of work are distributed and the results are put together again, like SETI). An OS is not capable to do this, even with virtualization. So the answer is: no. You can run a single OS only on a single computer. A virtual machine still needs to run on a single host, even in a cloud.

BTW, VMware Workstation is not a cloud-aware hypervisor.

AWo

VCP 3 & 4

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Welcome to the forums!

In the year 2010 this must still be managed by the application (distributed processing where chunks of work are distributed and the results are put together again, like SETI). An OS is not capable to do this, even with virtualization.

Well, actually, 20 years ago Groupe Bull had an OS that did precisely that. It allowed a single OS image to span entire networks and use resources as if it were a single computer. But I agree that no mainstream OS provides the functionality.

I remember that back at school we used Unix based thing called Mosix. It allowed whole network cluster to become "one computer" and automatically migrated processes to nodes with low load.

So I though, fifteen years later, with all the "cloud" buzz, it would be possible to have virtualization layer which could hide details and let Windows think that there is one big multicore computer.

But it seems I was wrong. Event Mosix isn't open source any more!

and there are people who had same idea as me: http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=710361

So I though, fifteen years later, with all the "cloud" buzz, it would be possible to have virtualization layer which could hide details and let Windows think that there is one big multicore computer.

Microsoft does have something that uses multiple machines and sort of hides the details: Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS.) What you want is to make a "generic OS" become cluster-capable. One can imagine it would be possible but it wouldn't really be virtualization since virtualization doesn't hide the physical CPU. For example, when you lose a machine, how will generic Windows deal with going from 100 CPUs to 99? Thus you'll have do do something like emulate "just one CPU" to hide the change in CPUs. And emulation is not virtualization.

I'm not saying it's impossible. just that it's a technology that not really virtualization as it's done now. "Clouds" hide the details, but clouds don't have to be virtual either.

Ok, thanks. You have a point.

It seems that recommended solution is:

• buy one big super multi socket multi core powerful computer

• OR use application which can cooperate over network with it's instances on other nodes

• OR use special cluster aware operating system