Venting my frustration with FreeBSD

[pete wright]

On 12/5/06, Josh Paetzel <josh at tcbug.org> 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


-- 
~~o0OO0o~~
Pete Wright
www.nycbug.org
NYC's *BSD User Group