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?"

Comments

Re:LINUX OS

[boaworm]

Well... the new IBM machine BlueGene (II) or whatever its named is supposed to run linux.. and the new cluster used for nuclear simulations is also to run linux.. so it actually seems like a fairly common choice. And if they choose linux this early in the project, they can

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 ?

2.5 has full support

[DarkMan]

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).

Let's TRY to be objective...

[erroneus]

...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.

Re:Let's TRY to be objective...

[ChaosDiscord]

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'm involved with a number of high energy physics experiments around the world (from a "physicist needs an obscene amount of computer power but a minimal budget, I try to give it to them" standpoint). Everyone is using Linux clusters at the moment. Why? Two reasons.

The first is price. None of these projects are rolling in money. Saving a few thousand dollars while setting up a hundred node cluster is a big win. The people working on the projects are technically skilled enough that a Unix varient is not significantly harder to use than a Windows variant, so there is no increase in TCO due to support.

The second is trust. They've been repeatedly burned by proprietary software. They run into a problem and the publisher isn't inclined to help (or wants more money than they have to fix it), and they're forced to fine another solution. Linux may not be perfect, but they're free to fix their own problems. They don't view it from a "Free Software is Ethical" view, but from a pragmatic "we've been repeatedly screwed and it isn't happening again" view.