On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 05:46:17PM +0100, Tim Cutts wrote: > > 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.
Doesn't it always? > 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. HPC use very few system calls and make little use of those calls beyond large-block sequential I/O and our application networks; there are few execution threads to stress the scheduler and memory is usually very carefully managed. Transaction workloads--think TPCx--spend a LOT more time in the kernel than pretty much anything HPC. Also consider the IOPS (I/O per second) metrics that the transaction and non-HPC storage providers live and die by, and that we just don't care about. -- David N. Lombard, Intel, Irvine, CA I do not speak for Intel Corporation; all comments are strictly my own. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
