On 23 Jun 2008, at 7:41 pm, Kyle Spaans wrote:
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 03:33:19PM -0400, Lawrence Stewart wrote:
More specifically for HPC, linux seems designed for the desktop, and
for small memory machines.
That's funny, because I've heard people get scared that it was the
complete opposite. That Linux was driven by Big Iron, and that no
one cared about the "little desktop guy" (Con Kolivas is an
interesting history example).
I think it depends on which bit of "Linux" you're talking about. I
think Lawrence was really referring to the kernel (<pedantic
mode="Stallman">Which is of course the only bit that can actually be
called Linux anyway</pedantic>). The impression is indeed the other
way around when you look at the whole distribution, which is easier to
target at server tasks than it is at a novice desktop user, and
attempts to make the desktop really accessible to non-nerds are still
very much in their infancy, IMHO.
I guess the kernel really was developed for desktop machines, if we
consider the sort of thing people did with Linux back in 1992 (which
is when I first used it). Later people realised they could use this
to save a bunch of money on big-iron traditional server tasks, and it
did very nicely thank-you, and no-one really cared whether the
performance was top-notch. After all, performance per dollar was
superb (and still is).
Even now, our little HPC community are probably pretty much the only
people who really care that much about the performance of the OS
kernel itself. Oh, OK, maybe some of the embedded guys do as well,
given they're trying to run it on really tiny hardware.
And in my little corner of the HPC world, genomics, where the vast
majority of the crap run on my clusters is written in perl, python,
ruby, java and R, I find it pretty difficult to get too worked up
about kernel performance, memory latencies and cache miss rates. It's
fairly irrelevant when I can't even get users to write code in a
compiled language, where they can even attempt to control the layout
of data in memory and get performance close to anything I would
consider acceptable.
<yorkshiremen number="4">You guys don't realise how lucky you are</
yorkshiremen> :-)
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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