How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

Posted Sep 27, 2005 14:30 UTC (Tue) by dlapine (subscriber, #7358)
In reply to: How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge) by dlang
Parent article: How will Linux be leveraged in next-gen supercomputers? (NewsForge)

The altix I'm adminning at this moment ( :p ) has 2 512 cpu nodes.

The kernel is SGI enhanced to support all 512 Cpus, but what's not common knowledge is that a set of 6 cpu's are reserved to support OS operations, including the parallel filesystem cxfs. The other 506 CPU's are scheduled with Moab, and the users run MPI code on them with better efficiency than they get on my other cluster, the 887 node Itanium 2 cluster with myrinet.

My point is this: the SGI-modified Linux kernel running on the RHEL OS requires 6 CPUS to handle all of the tasks the OS is asked to perform (multiple 10Gige connections, 200TB+ of parallel filesystems, SMP scheduler/batch job system, etc). What better example of the power of the linux kernel to utilize multiple processors (and potentially, multiple cores) would you like?

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