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New Mega Alphas
GoNINzo writes: "Compaq has just announced the new Alpha servers. The have between 8 and 32 CPUs, run with a 64-bit 731 MHz Alpha chip, and current are distributed with Digital Unix or VMS. How soon before these machines are shipping with Linux preinstalled?"
The natural result of that is that hacking on SMP stuff is not of top priority to the average person using Linux let alone those that are actively "kernel hacking."
That's a mouthful that effectively says "few people truly care about SMP."
Of those that do have SMP hardware, how many have more than 2 CPUs? My SMP motherboard has only slots for 2. The Slashdot What's a good motherboard for SMP Linux? discussion mostly found 2-way and 4-way SMP hardware.
Recent pricing at PriceWatch indicates that quad Xeon mobos start around $2500, and that ignores CPUs.
Certainly consistent with these being very expensive puppies that there is, resultantly, relatively little experience with.
Soup it up to 8-way SMP, and the pricing obviously heads into the stratosphere, thus further discouraging the wide deployment that allows the "open source" principle that
If it costs $20K for the motherboard, and $100K for the system, that rather diminishes the number of "eyeballs."
I think I have to agree that Linux is unlikely to be as ready to take advantage of high end SMP hardware as VMS, "whatever they want to call Ultrix today," Irix, or Solaris.
It only will get much better when there's a goodly population of kernel hackers with 16-way Alpha boxes :-). (Drool...)
Alternatively, it would be rather cool if there was some platform where we could get "massively SMP" motherboards where the CPUs didn't have to be "massively expensive." I dunno what, exactly. StrongARM would be interesting, but I gather that it is not terribly supportive of SMP. MIPS looks like the architecture for which there exist both cheap CPUs and massively parallel systems ( e.g. - the SGI/Origin "Cray" boxes).
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
It has been slow since the maintainer of the project (Tim Leary) passed away a few years ago... I seen one running at a comdex a few years ago, the machine keep getting a "God Complex" whenever the self-awareness patch was loaded into kernel space.... The machine had a huge ego and starting sending tcp/ip packets to Solaris machine, reportly the packets contained things like "So, check me out, Linux stud, that's right, you want to get with this baby" and "Check out my uptime chic, my uptime is huge, and that isn't the only thing huge, my other huge thing has a high uptime to, want to get with this baby?"
Microsoft did intergrate a self-awareness patch into Windows98, but everytime they installed it, it was slow, sluggish and crashed a lot. Most thought it was just windows being windows, but some experts believe that the machine was depressed and tried to commit sucide once it was aware of it's true nature...
Microsoft advised users to install the "heavy drinking" patch, to "easy the pain" of the Windows self-awareness patch.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
As for Beowulf, in fact the current Linux port sort of does a "beowulf-in-a-box". We support SMP up to four processors. Above that and you run multiple instances of the OS in different "partitions" of CPU-sets. Again, if a business need arose to require supporting a single instance of Linux on a 32-processor system, we could probably make that happen ("Given enough money, all problems are shallow?" 8-) )