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BigTux Shows Linux Scales To 64-Way
An anonymous reader writes "HP has been demonstrating a Superdome server running the Stream and HPL benchmarks, which shows that the standard 2.6 Linux kernel scales to 64 processors. Compiling the kernel didn't scale quite so well, but that was because it involves intermittent serial processing by a single processor. The article also notes that HP's customers are increasingly using Linux for enterprise applications, and getting more interested in using it on the desktop..."
While FreeBSD is a great OS/kernel, it doesn't scale as well as Linux, end of story.
Huh? What smoke are you craking? Here is the comparison of MS's latest and greatest Windows 2003 server editions So, umm where is this double of what Linux supports? Plain vanilla Linux 2.6 can do 64-way no problem. Actually, SGI has had single image 128-way Linux system out for a while. They should have 256-way, single image Linux system out soon. That is more then MS can even touch. Maybe do some research before you just shoot off FUD.If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
If it can scale to 16 procs well, it will scale to 64 procs well.
Until you start talking about double that amount of procs, which is what Windows Server does these days
Wrong. Windows Server 2003 supports a maximum of only 64 processors, and I believe it was significantly tested only on 32-way and smaller machines.
Think about virtualization. I would love to have a 64-way system and break that up into 32 2-way systems or 16 4-ways systems. It would make system management much easier. And with software, you can instantly assign more processors in a virtualized system to a server that was being hit hard. So your 4-way DB can turn into a 8-way or 16-way DB in an instant. Once the load is gone, you set it back to a 4-way DB.
I personally still prefer to load balance many smaller servers to save costs. However, this could be an excellent option for some enterprises. I know where I work we have some big Sun boxes and we just add processors as we need. However, that has proven to be rather expensive and virtualizing could help save some big costs.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
The problem is that most resources (memory, the bus, disks, etc) can only be used by one CPU at a time. So, for problems which are resource-intensive, you're generally better to cluster than to use SMP, so that each processor has its own bus, memory, etc.
No, you have a misconception. On these REAL big iron systems, each CPU (or each few CPUs) does have its own busses, memory, and io busses.
So in that regard it is as good as a cluster, but then add the fact that they have a global, cache coherent shared memory and interconnets that shame any cluster.
The only advantage of a cluster is cost. Actually redundancy plays a role too, although less so with proper servers, as they have redundancy built in, and you can partition off the system to run multiple operating systems too.
To be efficient, the processors would need gigantic caches, to keep the load on the rest of the system down. Either that, or you COULD run the CPUs out of step over a bus that is 64 times faster than normal. I'd hate to be the person designing such a system, though.
Now, this system could be of extreme interest in the supercomputer world. One of the biggest complaints about clustering is the poor interconnects. This would seem to get round that problem. A Blue Gene-style cluster where each node is a 64-way SMP board, and you're running a few thousand nodes, would likely be an order of magnitude faster than anything currently on the supercomputer charts.
Not really. Check the world's second fastest supercomputer. It is a cluster of 20 512-way IA64 systems running Linux.
There are plenty of them on the market, and as the price comes down, there will be even more.
To whom do you think HP has been selling the SuperDome line? And to whom has Sun been selling the E10/12/15K?
One of the benefits of using a huge multiprocessor Sun box, though, besides the massive numbers of CPUs you can have in a single frame running under a single system image is the ability to dynamically reconfigure resources, like a few other posters have touched on.
Imagine this... you have a box with 64 CPUs and 128GB of RAM. During the day, you have developers who are working with 16 CPUs and 32GB of RAM, working on the next generation of the database you'll be running for your business. A development domain.
You have another domain of 16 CPUs and 32GB as a test domain. Like when stuff goes out to beta, you run tests on the stuff you've pushed out from your development copy to see if it's ready for prime-time.
You have a third domain of 32 CPUs and 64GB in which you run production. It's a bit oversized for your needs for the work throughout the day, but it's capable of handling peak loads without slowing down.
Then, you have a nightly database job that runs recalculating numbers for all the accounts, dumping data out to be sent to a reporting server somewhere, batch data loads coming in that need to be integrated into your database. Plus you have to keep servicing minimal amounts of requests from users throughout the night, but hey, nobody's really on between 10PM and 4AM.
Wouldn't it be nice to drop the dev and test databases down to maybe 4CPUs if they're still running minimal tasks, and throw 56CPUs and 112GB of RAM at your nightly batch jobs? They get what's almost the run of the machine... until you're done with the batch jobs. Then you shrink production back to half the machine, and boost up the test and dev to a quarter each... so everyone's happy when the day starts.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
This is an unmodified stock 2.6 kernel (well it's patched with stuff that's in distros, and will be in the next kernel). Out of the box, it detected the NUMA set up, memory partitions, the whole bit.
The SGI boxes are nothing like the stock kernel.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oh, and if you think the latest implementation of Linux thread are slower, especially slower then MS Windows, you are an idiot. Here is are some test from IBM. Current Linux threads were spawning at more then 10,000 PER SECOND while MS Windows was spawning barely 6,000. Linux Thread performance, scroll down to the "pretty" graphs. Oh, and these numbers are higher then Solaris. Linux threads and Linux processes spawn _MUCH_ faster then the best MS has to offer and faster then Solaris.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Have you used any _recent_ Linux thread? LinuxThreads is an implementation of the Posix 1003.1c thread package.
Dude, get with the times, LinuxThreads are obsolete. Kernel 2.6 / glibc 2.3 use NPTL, which launches new threads four times faster than LinuxThreads, allows you to have more than 8192 threads per process, doesn't require you to have lots of manager threads that don't do anything useful, delivers signals to threads as opposed to processes, and is actually more-or-less POSIX compliant.
I've been using NPTL on my workstation for 12 months, and I haven't looked back (except when early versions of Mono were incompatible with NPTL). You talk about "any _recent_ Linux thread" - but it looks like you are using a Debian Woody...