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SGI NUMAflex Linux System On Display @ SC2002
jarrod.smith writes "
According to SGI will unveil
its Intel® Itanium® 2
NUMAflex shared-memory supercomputer architecture (which runs Linux as its OS) at Supercomputing 2002 which runs this week in Baltimore, MD.
The link at SGI says the system will be on display at the show. The exhibit floor opens this evening. Unfortunately I did not go this year. Can those lucky enough to be at the meeting scope it out and post comments?"
1: Fine-tune Linux to fit the platform
2: Design the platform to utilize linux
So it sounds fair to me.. Consider installing some propriatory OS instead.. where they cannot play around, change kernel design, drivers, VM or whatever they fancy. Would not that be a greater drawback ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
The Los Alamos National Laboratory is building a supercomputer based on a Beowulf Cluster with 1024 nodes (2 processor in each node). You can read the story here or in this Slashdot thread.
SGI has been working on this machine for a while now, and you can be sure the linux it runs has been tweaked for performance.
This machine is Intel based. SGI had to choose to port IRIX or make Linux run well. IRIX isn't going on their IA64 computers, period.
SGI has always focused on high speed internal communication in its machines, and SGI has tended to lag behind the curve in the MIPS processor's raw MHZ. The IA64 chips are much faster than any MIPS processor out there. This machine has some amazing performance--I think everyone will be surprised at what SGI has done. If you need a high end single image shared memory Linux or Intel solution, SGI has filled that role.
To be fair, if you don't need this machine.. don't buy it or think about it. SGI is a dying company and in the long term you'll get better support elsewhere. Sun and HP will have competing machines out, but they won't perform as well. I trust HP and Sun to be around longer than SGI though, and they won't fuck you over like SGI will.
What else can I say? Oh, the one I saw was painted in penguin colors.
Well, damn as nearly. Linux is only in catchup when the manufacturor will not release spec on how to use thier hardware.
When it comes to NUMA machines, Linux is up there. It may not excel at everything (yet - I'm sure that it will get there if it's not already). I'm mostly talking about the 2.5 kernel series.
From the status list
New scheduler for improved scalability (Ingo Molnar)
Support for Next Generation POSIX Threading (NGPT team)
Syscall interface for CPU task affinity (Robert Love)
Hotplug CPU support (Rusty Russell)
NUMA topology support (Matt Dobson)
Per-cpu hot & cold page lists (Andrew Morton, Martin Bligh)
NUMA aware scheduler extensions (Erich Focht, Michael Hohnbaum)
The biggest performance changes in 2.5 seem to be in the many thread and many CPU region, including NUMA.
I'd trust it. (Yes, I do do scientific supercomputing).
...okay so Linux is being applied to all these terrific projects of scale both large and small. Is it because it's an open system with seemingly hyperactive development or is it because it's simply better than anything else out there?
I'm trying my best to maintain a level of respect for the MS operating system product so I'd like to know if anyone knows of any amazing projects MS OSs are being used for. For that matter, what about other OSs in general?
I think it's terrific that Linux is used this way but I wonder if it's because of its availability or because of its technology. I tend to think it's for its availability but I'm no expert. I think answers and other points of perspective from others in the Slashdot community would help to show some objectivity here.