Slashdot Mirror
An Interesting Boot Log On Alpha
Here is an interesting Boot log on an Alpha. What is so interesting about this boot log? Nothing special, just that this Alpha's got 31 Processors, 256GB RAM -- looks VERY impressive. I wouldn't mind having one of those beasts at work *drooling all over*. Oh, and it compiles the kernel very fast :)
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.
Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken.
Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.
Oh, wait, front panels went out in the 70's. nevermind.
Well... the S/390 port runs on a VM, so Linux doesn't know the kind of power that is actually down there..
Nope, the S/390 port runs either in a VM or natively. You can boot up a 390 with Linux as your only OS, and then it definitely knows about the whole machine.
It's just that far more people are likely to have access to a VM running on a 390 than there are that have a whole 390 to play with.
No, no, no. It ain't ME babe,
It ain't ME you're looking for.
-- Alastair
As taken from yet another Kernel Traffic Post:
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
It can play an hour's worth of MP3s in 78 seconds.
(and execute an infinite loop in less than 3.5 minutes)
Duct tape + WD40 => DevOps
ttyS00 at 0x03f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
All I need is another 255.8725 GB, another 29 processors, another 7 LAN cards, and I'm right there!
1990: You could easily read everything in comp.*. You bitched about all the weenies clogging up the alt hierarchy.
1995: You could easily read everything in comp.lang.perl. You bitched about all the weenies clogging up the comp.* hierarchy.
1998: You could easily read everything on slashdot. You bitched about all the weenies clogging up Usenet.
July 2000: You could easily read everything on kuro5hin. You bitched about all the weenies clogging up slashdot.
September 2000: Bloody weenies clog up kuro5hin. End of universe as we know it. Film at eleven.
At one of my jobs, I was in the computer room of a Vast Fianancial Company That Shall Remain Nameless. They had an IBM RS/6000 SP-2 supercomputer that filled most of one wall, 32 POWER3 processors and untold terrabytes of storage.
I was left alone to work my mojo on a much smaller Sun server, but once I was good and certain i was alone, and that there were no cameras monitoring me, I wandered over to the supercomputer. I looked at the gray and blue tower that held the processors and RAM. It was worth $20, easy.
I touched it, caressed the cool metal of the mesh grid over the airvents with my fingertips, feeling the warm air and the low buzz. I'd pay $100 to do that again.
Then I licked it.
Priceless.
SoupIsGood Food
According to http://www.compaq.com/products/software/linux/ the high end Alpha servers don't support Linux yet. I'm sure Compaq Research has done it many times, but if it's not supported at this point, it means Compaq dosen't feel that a client needs to pay possibly millions for a server that won't perform at it's maximum capibilities when loaded with Linux. Compaq is pushing Linux big time, and it will definitly be a technical reason for it not running on a server, not a marketing decision.
Powerful, yes, but not as powerful as THIS
--
Chief Frog Inspector
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
All the posts about "I need a towel" and "they should sell tickets just to touch it" are gonna look funny when this is just another slag heap of unusable parts.
"Why, when I was yer age, miboy, we had to put up with using a computer. That's a complicated physically connected brick of processing components. We thought a mere 2^5 processors was worth drooling over. Yes, miboy, I know your cochlear implant has more than that. You're missing the point. This thing was tremendous! It took up a whole rack: four times the size of a grown man! And all of its memory circuits were in the same cabinet, requiring massive cooling apparatus, unlike the distributed memory crystals that people embed in their jewelry."
Anyone still drooling over 2^5 address space on ferrite core memory? Anyone still drooling over 2^5 address lines? Or data lines?
[
People seem to be complaining that "this isn't news".. no, it's not the kind of thing that you'd see on your local TV news, but it's "News for Nerds". Which is, as I'm sure you're aware, what this is all about. Why should I care that you don't like this story? I didn't like the last one, do you care?
-
Meep meep
> Can anyone comment on the SMP performance linearity of the current Linux kernel on more than 4 CPUs?
It depends upon the task being performed of course. Some tasks can never be parallelized at all, regardless of how many CPUs you have and what operating system you are running.
> Did they every sort out the issues that prevented kernel socket (or was it I/O?) APIs
> being called concurrently by processes on multiple CPUs?
Yes, Linux TCP/IP is fully threaded and will run concurrently on all CPUs, assuming that there is work to be done on all of them. (a single socket will not run on 100 CPUs at the same time, for instance)
Processors 1 to 15 would work on distributed.net...
:)
Numbers 16 to 20 would do Seti.
Numbers 21-29 would run Quake3, Civ:CTP, and XWS.
Numbers 30 and 31 would run the realtime disk encryption/decryption series
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
that *still* depends on the workload. if it's CPU-bound, it just works. if it's I/O bound, it depends on global system recourses (bus speed and bandwith), and on how well smp-threaded that particular subsystem is on the OS. one of the big improvements of the linux 2.4 kernel is precisely a major overhaul of the tcp/ip stack to smp-thread it completely. OTOH, heavy filesystem work (lots of rename(), unlink(), open(O_CREAT), etc) is not likely to scale super-well, because of filesystem locking constraints, and that's under all OSes too, which is why you generally avoid writing your big programs in such a way that they have to be messing around with lots of little files all the time (e.g that's why you use a database backend, or some kind of db format, rather than flat files, if you want a news server that scales). beyond that, in the real high end (32 procs and more), the SMP model itself starts showing its limits, which is why NUMA (non-uniform memory access, i.e. not all memory is equally fast from each processor) was invented. Linux 2.4 has some preliminary support for NUMA, but it's still in the beginning stages.
"Feh" is right. Who needs an alpha when I can get 0.0033 Bogomips on my c64. Read it and weep!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of C64s! Think of the power!
imo, what it can do well is less important than what it can't. To paraphrase Limp Bizkit, "Let's break some sh**."
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
its porn for geeks! if you will excuse me... i think i need a towel now.
Can anyone comment on the SMP performance linearity of the current Linux kernel on more than 4 CPUs? Did they every sort out the issues that prevented kernel socket (or was it I/O?) APIs being called concurrently by processes on multiple CPUs?
I did a search for "Bogo" to find the BogoMIPS and found this:
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Feh, I thought, either Alpha's REALLY suck or (more likely) there's a bug there. Then I took a closer look:
SMP starting up secondaries.
Calibrating delay loop... 1493.17 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1493.17 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1493.17 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
Calibrating delay loop... 1488.98 BogoMIPS
SMP: Total of 31 processors activated (46170.90 BogoMIPS).
Oh.
--
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
I'm glad you almost guarantee it, because I'd almost like a different opinion. I mean, if it's a "good" salary, I damn well better be able to afford 32 CPUs in a single machine!
/. is that machines like that make geeks drool. The fact that it compiled and booted is exciting in the same way that people who live in an area get excited when the local ball teams win games. It's not really rational, it's tribal bonding. Reports like this confirm the Slashdot tribal belief that while Linux may never be Grandma's desktop OS, it will continue to make inroads and eventually dominate the real computers of the world. This makes the Linux enthusiasts very happy, especially since financial rewards are secondary to the more important free-software geek reward of enhanced reputation (so saith ESR at least), and this is like reputation enhancement by mere association. "Sure I only run Red Hat on my aging P/75, but if I had 32 CPUs and a computer the size of an elephant, I could still run Linux. Let's see you do that with Windows 2000. Nyeah!"
For the record, I don't think the linked page is a brag. I think it's notes to interested parties who are working on porting the Linux kernel to large multi-processor machines. The reason it got on
I do not have a signature
Hey, welcome to Retro-Slashdot! Back before there was all this legal coverage, back before "grits" were ever mentioned, back before moderation reached the masses, back before user customization of displayed stories, even back before the coming of the Evil One (Jon Katz) . . . THIS is an example of what Slashdot regularly did.
Steven E. Ehrbar
You used the equivalent of a megaphone on slashdot (the +1 bonus) to tell us that you like it and think it's a good thing, in only slightly more words? Did you think this was actually insightful or worthy of everyone's attention, or did you just think "I want everyone to know what I think, and though I'm not more sophisticated about my thoughts than everyone else without a +1 bonus, I'm going to go ahead and say it, because I can"?
.sig is not generated by each user when he posts a comment, where he's free to forge it. It's appended by slashdot's servers. It's an effective deterrent to impersonation, and it must again receive its prominence within the social jurisprudencial realm of slashdot.
There is an aristocracy on slashdot; make no mistake about it. When people like drendite (userid=#3) speak, people bow down in worship, simply because of his low userid. It doesn't matter whether one actually makes a true contribution to society; what matters is the aristocratic entitlement conferred by longstanding existence (not participation).
Take the British Parliament, for example. Though Britain still hasn't come close to providing universal healthcare or proper dentistry they sorely need, they have finally seen the folly of maintaining a ruling aristocracy, and have eliminated the hereditary seats in the House of Lords. Slashdot should follow their lead.
The solution is not to take away the voice of people with low userids. Nor is the solution to eliminate the +1 bonus, because it serves a legitimate purpose and is democratically attainable by all, from the oldest poster to the neophyte with a five-figure userid. The solution is to eliminate the tagging of comments with the userid of their posters.
The userid tag does nothing to help the community, and does much to harm it, by encouraging wishywashy moderators to inflate the karma of oldtimers and penalize the newguys who express controversial opinions. (When moderators waver between slamming a post or modding it up, they usually defer to the userid in addressing its seriousness and authority. This is unacceptable.)
If you're worried about fraud and impersonation, then you already have an effective means of distinguishing between posts: the signature. The
Effective policing (moderating) can only go so far. We must correct these social ills by striking at their sources -- their causes -- not merely at their symptoms. Join with me in tearing down the illegitimate reign of the slashdot aristocracy and their petty notions of insight and imformativeness, and lift up a glorious new tomorrow, where everyone, democratically, no matter what the tld of his email address or the number of his userid, shares in the same promise of opportunity for reasoned argument and receptive audience.
Thank you for your time.
Froid
I work at DEC^H^H^HCompaq. We have one of these bad-boys in a lab, and I have to walk by it a lot. It's this fairly massive thing, the size of 3 or 4 fridges all in a row. They're bluish, and the heart of the beast is identifiable by the LED display that sits at about eye height, saying things like:
AlphaServer GS320
16 processors configured
And so on. I adore it. And every once in a while, when nobody's looking..
I give it a hug.
Once, I was talking to a co-worker about it.
"You know the Wildfire in the lab?" I asked.
"The what now?" he replied. So I told him about the Wildfire. Later that day, we were walking through the lab, past it.
He gave it a hug.
If anyone else wants to send the wildfire a hug, let me know.
I think we should hold a fund-raiser in which people would pay $20 to be able to see this thing in the flesh. $100 if you want to actually touch it.
:)
I'd be first in line