[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
>> I might guess that the service processor is x86, and that starting with 
>> gentoo for the compute nodes was simpler than starting with Linux From 
>> Scratch, really doing it from scratch, or making a special embedded 
>> kernel or RTOS for the hardware.
> 
> Sounds a reasonable theory. the service processor being x86 and all.  ;)
>  I guess I'm just wondering why they didn't use Gentoo on the service
> processor too.

I would venture to suggest that it is for market acceptance reasons.  To 
me, the question is why did they mention Gentoo at all?  I wouldn't 
have.  I would have just said that the compute nodes run a custom linux 
kernel, and left it at that.  Other people would have created a 
marketing name for the kernel on their compute nodes. Cray uses two 
linux systems.  UNICOS/lc is the user visible OS, and that is a 
customized Suse.  Compute Node Linux (CNL) is what runs on the compute 
nodes.   I would imagine that UNICOS/lc is only slightly changed, while 
CNL might be heavily customized (they talk about schedule and paging 
improvements in some of their papers).  I also suspect that CNL was 
derived from some distribution rather than entirely rolled from scratch. 
  I could be wrong, but I haven't really heard of anyone rolling a 
distro from scratch, even though some people incredibly customize their 
in house distribution.