On 12/5/06, John Baldwin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tuesday 05 December 2006 17:06, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 December 2006 15:36, pete wright wrote:
> > On 12/5/06, Josh Paetzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 05 December 2006 11:19, Nick Hibma wrote:
> > > > > 1) SMP scalability. 4-way boxes are relatively common, and
> > > > > hardware with higher CPU counts is only going to get more and
> > > > > more common. I'm no industry expert, but 5 years from now
> > > > > will my clients be considering buying 32 and 64 way boxes?
> > > > > Possibly. Will FreeBSD be in a positiion to compete favorably
> > > > > vs. the alternatives on such hardware?
> > > >
> > > > People have been working on this for years. It's a difficult
> > > > thing to get right. Sun has been spending a *LOT* of time doing
> > > > this for Solaris, and I bet that even Linux isn't there yet.
> > >
> > > Linux actually scales very well in this area. My friends in the
> > > supercomputer business tell me that people are successfully using
> > > linux on 1024-way SSI boxes. It doesn't scale quite as well as
> > > IRIX, but a lot of people opt for linux anyways.
> > >
> > > For instance, NASA Columbia, which is a cluster of 20 512-way SSI
> > > Altix's is successfully running linux, and comes in #8 on
> > > top500.org's supercomputer list.
> >
> > yea, i'm pretty familiar with those systems and i would have to say
> > that the Altix is indeed quite impressive. but, i would not equate
> > the ability for SGI to implement a large SSI cluster like this to a
> > "normal" user being able to implement a similar setup with a stock
> > linus kernel or stock distro for that matter....
> >
> > -pete
>
> What sort of 'normal' user has access to that kind of hardware?
>
> Of course they aren't running a stock kernel or distro, but neither
> are a lot of the guys using linux on real-time embedded hardware.
> Google doesn't run a stock kernel or distro either, and Verio and
> Yahoo don't run stock FreeBSD distributions or kernels either.
I would wager that Yahoo's FreeBSD kernel is a lot more stock than the Altix
one for Linux though. I think the poster's point is that you aren't going to
get an OTS OS to run on a 512-way cluster, and that if one had time and
hardware one could probably hack FreeBSD up a bunch to run on a 512-way
system just as SGI hacked up Linux.
yes, I should have been more clear on my intent. I was trying to
point out that comparing Altix to a stock FreeBSD system may not be a
fair comparison. I recon it'd be closer to what the folks at Juniper
networks or NetApp have done. Taken the OS as a foundation to run
their specific code on.
As an aside, one of the large advantages IMHO opinion with using
FreeBSD is the license itself which allows companies to use FreeBSD as
a building block unencumbered with a prohibitive license.
-pete
--
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group
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