[geeks] Linc is cool

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, 15 May 2001, David Michaud wrote:

> "Joshua D. Boyd" wrote:
> > 
> > On Tue, 15 May 2001, David Michaud wrote:
> > 
> > > Brian Hechinger wrote:
> > > > well, it looks like Linux is lagging behing NetBSD in the SGI/MIPS arena, but
> > > > it doesn't matter since nobody is working on the 4d boxen.  looks like it's
> > > > time for me to start.
> > >
> > > I'm baffled as to why one would want to cripple a functional machine by
> > > putting linux on it. Put linux on a Silicon Graphics machine, and it
> > > might as well just be a peecee.
> > 
> > You might consider asking SGI, who has Linux running on an Origin2000 if
> > they feel they are now in posession of a plain old PC.
> > 
> 
> I might point out that the O2k that they had running linux had 256 R10k
> processors, and after running a number of FFT benchmarks, determined
> that it has equivilent performance to a similarly configured 32
> processor O2k running IRIX...

Yes, but still, there is never anything plain about a 32proc PC.  Anyway,
they had announced that the main machine that they were using for ongoing
development was a 32proc machine.
(http://oss.sgi.com/projects/linux-scalability/download/mips64.announce)

Anyway, SGI was expecting the first tests to be fairly poor.  For one
thing, Linux knows nothing ccNuma architectures.  Thus, it treats the O2k
as a giant SMP machine, leading to really bad memory arranging. 

There are other problems.  I'd assume that the mutex locking is still too
course for so many processors (2 - 4 procs is the sweet spot for linux).

See http://oss.sgi.com/projects/linux-scalability/ for more info on how
they are working on the problem.


--
Joshua Boyd