High Performance Computing Virtualization | Virtual SMP | ScaleMP

High Performance Computing Virtualization | Virtual SMP | ScaleMP: "The innovative Versatile SMP™ (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple x86 systems into a single virtual x86 system, delivering an industry-standard, high-end symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computer. Using software to replace custom hardware and components, ScaleMP offers a new, revolutionary computing paradigm."

Another way to scale-out server virtually: Build a big "logical" x86 server out of multiple relatively inexpensive x86 servers, instead of getting big Sun (ahem ... Oracle) or IBM SMP servers. Servers are connected via Infiniband. Unlike Vmware/Xen hypervisors, this method allows a workload to transparently span the resources of multiple physical servers. But even with Infiniband, the memory latency can still be very significant. I remember experiencing very poor scale-out performance on DB2 with the IBM x3950 multi-chassis setup.

Some good articles that describes virtual SMP solutions:

• http://ideasint.blogs.com/ideasinsights/2009/11/building-large-smp-systems-with-virtualization.html (also mentioned a similar virtual SMP solution from 3Leaf that uses a proprietary server interconnect to reduce latencies UPDATE - 3Leaf Systems is out of business)
• http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/everyday-virtualization/2010/04/smp-hypervisor-scalemp.aspx
• http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/2240024681/Move-over-SMPs-Distributed-shared-memory-systems-step-in

I would love to see some real world benchmarks of these virtual SMP solutions vs hardware optimized SMP servers.