In last weeks column, I talked about “many-core” processors and why cache coherency may limit the number of cores you can place in a processor. This week I want to be fair and balanced. Large scale SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing) is possible, but is usually expensive. Turning a pile of servers into an SMP is, therefore, very desirable and has been advancing on both the hardware and software fronts. I have had a chance to ponder this topic quite a bit over the last several weeks, but not for the reasons you may think.