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How Far Can Large Commercial Applications Scale?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the taming-the-performance-curve dept.

clusteroid81 asks: "I've been working with customers who run large commercial applications on big iron (16-32 symmetric multi-processor systems - 64GB or more memory ). There are always numerous other front-end servers involved, but the application on the back end server is often difficult to spread across multiple systems or clusters due to the application architecture. Scaling is done by increasing memory and processor counts. As things progress, the bottleneck is usually contention within the application or operating system. Are there folks here on Slashdot who work with large single system commercial applications? What kind of processor counts and memory do the applications have and how well do they scale?"

2 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Enterprise by Procyon101 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It depends on how much enterprise you have in them. Enterprise is expensive, but when added liberally you can scale to huge amounts.

    I like to add a couple hundred enterprise myself.

  2. Vague question... Vague answers by subreality · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Different problems in computer science scale differently. You haven't given us enough data to really know what problem you're solving, so you're really not going to get a reasonable answer.

    I work for a company that has a large commercial application. We knew we needed to scale our data set and processing power to be huge, so we made sure from the start that the heavy lifting could be divided into little chunks, and thrown to the cluster. For our purposes, back end scalability is basically linear. When we need more, we just bring another rack of little 1U critters online. There are a few theoretical bottlenecks, but we'll never see them before we have our own nuclear power plant to run the data centers.

    For other applications we use, there is *no* scalability. The algorithm has to be single threaded. It doesn't matter if I run it on a cluster, or a machine bristling with CPUs. So we basically buy the data center equivalent of a gaming PC: The fastest processor and memory that fits our budget.

    So there are the ends of the spectrum. Your scalability will be somewhere between zero and infinity, depending on the problem at hand.