Slashdot Mirror
Linux May Need a Rewrite Beyond 48 Cores
An anonymous reader writes "There is interesting new research coming out of MIT which suggests current operating systems are struggling with the addition of more cores to the CPU. It appears that the problem, which affects the available memory in a chip when multiple cores are working on the same chunks of data, is getting worse and may be hitting a peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 cores, when entirely new operating systems will be needed, the report says. Luckily, we aren't anywhere near 48 cores and there is some time left to come up with a new Linux (Windows?)."
It's not the case of not being able to do such, but instead about where there are performance regressions. Of course it's possible to run Linux on multiple hundreds of cores, but it seems that after 48 cores there is a performance regression and thus all those cores don't benefit as much as they could. That is the issue here.
Oh look, CmdrTaco published yet another story with a poorly-written, hypersensationalist summary! Par for the course.
Yes it is lacking: it's too long for a /. "story". Editors want small, easily digested soundbites, not articles with actual information.
No kidding. SGI's Altix is a huge box full of multi-core IA-64 processors. 512 to 2048 cores is more normal, but they were reaching 10240 last I checked. This is SMP (NUMA of course), not a cluster. I won't say things work just lovely at that level, but it does run.
48 cores is nothing.
The thing is eldavojohn practically *is* an editor for /. , just check out his submission page. Despite having such a high UID he's got a solid reputation, a good writing style, and offers good commentary on a wide variety of topics.