BigTux project shows Linux scaling to 64 processor

[scuzzman]

While this isn't really Windows news, it is computer news... possibly even exciting for some :D

This is of interest to anyone running SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing)

HP on Tuesday demonstrated Linux scaling to 64 processors on its Superdome hardware as it seeks to reassure customers who are increasingly considering the open source operating system for enterprise applications.

The rest of the story is here.

And here's a little more of a taste:

On the Superdome, demonstrated at HP's labs in Böblingen, Germany, a kernel compile using a single Itanium 2 processor took about 19 minutes (there are about 20,000 files to compile in this job).

Because the compile contained serial jobs, during which one processor intermittently collated the work, performance improved by a factor of 26 when all 64 Itanium 2 processors were used. With no serial jobs a performance improvement of 64 would have been expected, said Sebastien Cabaniols, engineering project leader on the project.

In the STREAM benchmark, memory bandwidth rose from 5GB/s with one 'cell' of four processors, to 10GB/s with two cells, and continued to double until all 64 processors -- or all 16 cells -- were switched on to provide 80GB/s of bandwidth.

The HPL benchmark, which is used to measure performance when solving large linear equations, produced similar results, rising from 18 gigaflops with one cell of four processors to 277 gigaflops with all 16 cells, or 64 processors, running.

Ohhhh yeaaaa...

And this is the best part:

"This was a standard Linux distribution," said Cabaniols. "The kernel was able to discover the topology of the system and discover the memory in a NUMA pattern."