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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!"
ok..I'm NOT about to start the perverbial deluge of people wanting to know about a beowulf cluster of these things. But what I will ask is this: if it can do that for a kernel, I wonder how long it will take to do Mozilla, or XFree? It'd be interesting to see those stats.
JoeLinux
23 seconds is impressive. I, personally, have seen a 42 second compile time of a 2.2 series kernel on a Intel 8-way system (8GB ram, 8 550Mhz PIII Xeons w/ 1mb L2). It was in the 1 minute range with a 2.4 kernel.
Definately the most impressive x86 system I have ever seen.
...who wondered, "I didn't know that Clive Cussler had gotten into cluster design?
But, does anyone know how NUMA compares with, say, a beowulf cluster? Does NUMA allow you to 'bind' multiple systems into one, so that I wouldn't need to rewrite my software? Did these guys use a stock GCC or something special? I know you would need to use MPI or similar for beowulf. Is NUMA as scalable as Beowulf in terms of building huge-ass machines (of course if I was going to expend the effort to do that, I might as well want to write custom software).
If this type of system would allow 'supercomputer' performance on regular programs... well... that would be really nice. How much work is it to setup?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You can also get 23-second kernel compiles in software using Compilercache :-).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No, this is a case of free software and cheap hardware making technologies available now to many people for whom it wasn't available (i.e., outside the realm of affordability because it was only sold by expensive proprietary vendors) just a short time ago. That is a more significant change than the endless treadmill of Moore's Law to which we had become accustomed.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
But where can I get a NUMA cluster for $80? Should I Ask Slashdot?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
is there some hidden application of this that I'm not seeing?
How about doing other stuff really fast?
3D modeling. 3D simulations. Even extensive photoshop editing with complex filters can benefit from this kind of raw speed.
It wouldn't be a catchy headline, though, if it said "render a scene of a house in 40 seconds--oh, and here are the details of the scene so you can be impressed if you understand 3D rendering..."
There are hundreds of applications for this, many of which we don't do every day on our desktop simply because they take too much juice to be useful. With ever-faster computers, we will continue to envision and benefit from these new possibilities.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
You can't build a NUMA cluster worth a crap without a fast, low-latency interconnect.
Sequent's NUMA Boxen use a flavor of SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface) which is integrated into the memory controller.
While you can use some sort of PCI-based interconnect, the results are just plain not worth it.
Infiniband should be better, though I've heared the latency is too high to make this a marketable solution.
Keep your eyes on IBM's Summit chipset based systems. These are quads tied together with a "scalability port" and go up to 16-way. They should go to 32 or higher by 2003. That's when NUMA will -finally- be inevitable...
... with the advent of this new technology and raw speed, you should actually be able to use them!
[this is actually a joke]
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
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.
But the reserve for this machine is $3850. The article says 16 way, which would be four of these four-way SMP systems. That also doesn't take into account the need for a high-bandwidth, low latency interconnect (like SGI's NumaLink.) If you aren't expecting more than 16-way SMP, then you can probably get away with switched Gigabit Ethernet, as long as it is kept distinct from the nornal network connectivity. If the Gigabit upgrade is still dual portm then you are set. If not, you'll neet another NIC - though you will only really need one for the whole cluster.
Maybe instead of two grand, the poster meant twenty-grand. Either way, $20 grand is better than $100K!
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.
but why would you want to compile a kernel in 23 seconds?
.config file. I'll compile it, and send back to you by email a clickable link to download your custom tarball. Of course no one here would trust a remotely compiled kernel :)
I think this benchmark is used time and time again because its really the only one that nearly any Linux user would be able to compare their own experiences to. If they said 1.2 GFLOPS, I (and I suspect most others) could only say "Wow, that sounds like a lot. I wonder what that looks like." OTOH, I have seen how long it takes to download 33 Slackware diskettes in parallel on a v.34 modem, and I still run 3 P75's today.
I've been told that I will soon be deploying Beowulf HPC clusters to many clients, including universities and biomedical firms. If they were to tell me that the clusters will be able to do protein folds (or whatever they call it -- referring back to the nuclear simulation discussion) in "only 4 weeks", I won't have a clue as to how to scale that relative to customary performance of the day.
Sure, there are many other applications that are run on clusters, but kernel compiles are the ones that all of us do. It can give us an idea of what kind of performance you'd get out of other processor-intensive operations. And many people will tell you there are so many variables with kernel compiles that its ridiculous to compare the results.
Check out beowulf.org and see what people are doing with cluster computing. I've always wanted to open a site that compiles kernels for you. Just select the patches you want applied and paste the
Intelligent Life on Earth
Never ask a geek, "why?". Just nod your head and back away slowly.