It's easy to dismiss this: the fallacies of network programming, etc etc.
But something happened in the last 10 years many people haven't really thought through: the network became faster than (most spinning) disks. Reading 1 MB from a spinning disk is roughly slow as reading 1 MB from the network in the same data center.
That makes you consider exactly what a "computer" is. A "supercomputer" is little more than multiple traditional computers with very heavily optimized network interconnects. But now everyone's internet connects are just as fast, why should we consider a cluster of computers any different?
Yes, SSDs change this (especially M2!). But view the SSD -> Network relationship as we used to view the RAM -> Disk relationship.
I think it's worth rethinking some of the traditional boundaries of what "a computer" is.
True, however this is competing with Supercomputers, which are quite a special case.
It's difficult to define a supercomputer, but essentially a defining factor is being able to read data from the memory (not spinning/SSD disk) across the network at the same speed as if it were local. This is typically done with specialised networking (like Infiniband) that can reach nearly 100Gb/s, something that we are still quite far away from on 'commodity hardware'.
I think this company must be doing something very different, or have made some sort of breakthrough, that allows them to do what they're claiming, I don't think the network becoming faster and having SSDs is what has enabled this, at least not for the most part.
It's easy to dismiss this: the fallacies of network programming, etc etc.
But something happened in the last 10 years many people haven't really thought through: the network became faster than (most spinning) disks. Reading 1 MB from a spinning disk is roughly slow as reading 1 MB from the network in the same data center.
That makes you consider exactly what a "computer" is. A "supercomputer" is little more than multiple traditional computers with very heavily optimized network interconnects. But now everyone's internet connects are just as fast, why should we consider a cluster of computers any different?
Yes, SSDs change this (especially M2!). But view the SSD -> Network relationship as we used to view the RAM -> Disk relationship.
I think it's worth rethinking some of the traditional boundaries of what "a computer" is.