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SGI to Scale Linux Across 1024 CPUs
im333mfg writes "ComputerWorld has an article up about an upcoming SGI Machine, being built for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, "that will run a single Linux operating system image across 1,024 Intel Corp. Itanium 2 processors and 3TB of shared memory.""
It seems that if they pull this off one of the dtrongholds of solaris (namely massivly parralell computing) will have been conqurered by linux. I wonder how sun are feeling at the moment?
Solaris scales to hundreds of processors out-of-the-box. Until the vanilla Linux kernel accepts these changes and scale, Solaris still has a big edge in this area.
Lame analogy: many people have demonstrated that they can hack their Honda Civic to outperform a Corvette, however I can walk into a dealership and purchase the latter which performs quite well without mods.
RISC and CISC offer no final advantage over the other, so the one that dominated is the one that was here first.
Quick examples: RISC use less power because it has less logic? No, it needs to run at a higher frequency to maintain the same speed as a slower CISC.
RISC is easier to program? Depends on the person. A compiler can take advantage of large instructions very well which are hardware optimized.
RISC easier to develop/manage? I'll say yes for RISC on this one. There's simply less logic on the chip so less logical errors possible. There's plenty more cache which can break but broken parts can be fused off.
RISC is physically smaller? No. RISC needs a higher clock frequency because many more instructions need to be executed. The result of this is that a much larger instruction cache is needed on chip.
I don't remember every comparison but it pretty much comes out that neither is better than the other. That being said RISC is better than x86. Everything is better than x86. However CISC vs RISC is much harder to judge. Having done x86, 68k, and MIPS I must say that RISC is a pleasure.
Until the vanilla Linux kernel accepts these changes and scale, Solaris still has a big edge in this area.
I wouldn't be surprised to see these changes in the 2.8 kernel. And what will people do until then I hear some people ask. I can tell you that right now it is very few people that actually have the need to scale to 1024 CPUs. And that will probably also be true by the time Linux 2.8.0 is released. AFAIK Linux 2.6 does scale well to 128 CPUs, but I don't have hardware to test it, neither does any of my friends. So I'd say there is no need for a rush to get this in mainstream, the few people that need this can patch their kernels. My guess is that in the time from now until 2.8.0 is released, we will see less than 1000 such machines worldwide.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?