back to article Software definer wants you to befriend the 'BFC', do a bit of 'reverse virtualization'

TidalScale is building a software-defined server product. But how would that work, as it needs to run in a server and you can’t really redefine the server you are running in, can you? Its software creates virtual machines, of course, called TidalPods, and these are used to “right-size” X86 servers dynamically to application …

  1. Candy

    Friendly

    Because the F in the Doom BFG stands for friendly, too...

  2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "you can’t really redefine the server you are running in"

    No, but I'm guessing you can partition its resources to different tasks - like every other VM system in existence.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pretty sure...

    ...applications that need that quantity of resource are already written to run on multiple computers.

    I do like the idea of spreading a single VM over a number of computers, but this feels more like a "checkbox feature" that could be added to KVM/VMWare.

  4. TrumpSlurp the Troll

    Supercomputer?

    Just keep adding chunks of hardware as the computing demand grows?

    There does seem to be an assumption that servers are so powerful these days that they can usually (always?) run more than one VM.

    Does anyone know of workloads so big they strain one server but can't be distributed?

    Met Office, for example, used to need very big iron for weather modelling.

    1. Horridbloke

      Re: Supercomputer?

      "Does anyone know of workloads so big they strain one server but can't be distributed?"

      Yes. Crysis.

  5. ikenassi

    Nice article by the Register. They seem to have done their homework. But what does "BFC" really mean?

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: ikenassi

      "big flexible computer"

      C.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    IEEE Paper on TidalScale from IEEE Computer Magazine

    The IEEE Published a paper on TidalScale in IEEE Computer they have a link on the web site to the paper. Ike Nassi the author was the Chief Scientist at SAP.

    https://www.tidalscale.com/hubfs/Marcom/White%20Papers/IEEE%20%20Scaling%20the%20Computer%20to%20the%20Problem.pdf?hsCtaTracking=bad11b47-4b16-43aa-95b9-a840d3fb296e%7Cb22cda54-dbf8-4b6c-be53-e23a108eb556

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like