Venting my frustration with FreeBSD

[Josh Paetzel]

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.

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2006/june/altix4700.html
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/stream_mail/2006/0012.html

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel