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23 Second Kernel Compiles
b-side.org writes "As a fine testament to how quickly linux is absorbing technology formerly available only to the computing elite, an LKML member posted a
23 second kernel compile time to the list this morning as a result of building a 16-way NUMA cluster. The NUMA technology comes gifted from IBM and SGI. Just one year ago, a
Sequent NUMA-Q would have cost you about USD $100,000. These days, you can probably build a 16-way Xeon (4X 4-way SMP) system off of ebay for two grand, and the NUMA comes free of charge!"
NUMA is rather different than Beowulf.
NUMA is just a strategy used for making computers that are too large for normal SMP techniques. I read a few good papers on sgi.com a couple of years ago that explained it in detail, and the NUMA link in the article had a quick definition. NUMA systems run one incarnation of one OS throughout the whole cluster, and usually imply some kind of crazy-ass bandwidth running between different machines. I don't think you could actually create a NUMA cluster of seperate quad Xeons boxes, and it would probably be ungodly slow if you tried.
There probably isn't any difference for kernel compiles between the two, but NUMA clusters don't require any reworking of normal multithreaded programs to utilize the cluster and can be commanded as one coherent entity (make -j 32, wheee).
I went and looked at the email and noticed that the very first patch he mentions was from the woman who came and gave a talk to EUGLUG last spring. For one of our Demo Days we emailed IBM and asked them if they would send down someone to talk about IBM's Linux effort. We were kind of worried that they would send a marketing type in a suit who would tell us all about how much money they were going to spend, etc., etc. But we were very pleasantly surprised when they sent down a hardcore engineer who had been with Sequent until they were swallowed by IBM.
She did a pretty broadranging overview of the linux projects currently in place at IBM, and then dived into the NUMA/Q stuff that she had been working on. The main gist of which is that Sequent had these 16-way fault-tolerant redundant servers that needed linux because the number of applications that ran on the native OS was small and getting smaller. Turned out that even the SMP code that was in the current tree at the time did not quite do it. She had some fairly hairy debugging stories, apparently sprinkling print statements through the code doesn't work too well when you're dealing with boot time on a multiprocessor system because it causes the kernel to serialize when in normal circumstances it wouldn't...
I think the end result of all this progress with multiprocessor systems is that we'll be able to go down to the hardware store and buy more nodes plug 'em into the bus; and compute away.
No way. Just a no-CPU, no-memory case and
motherboard costs $500. More like $2000
to $3000 for an old quad.
I am actually in the process of building a quad xeon right now with bits and pieces I bought off of E-Bay, and this is certainly doable. Not sure about the $500, but $2000-$3000 is high. I have the motherboard and memory riser now for $150, I am pretty sure that I can get a used rackmount case for $100 or so, the CPU's are going to cost around $60-70 each (P-III Xeon 500's), and memory is cheap as well.
I figure I will be in it for around $1000 in the end. Yes, $500 is a low number, but I also know that your estimates of $2000-3000 is high.