This paper tries to compare Linux vs. Solaris. Its author comes to many conclusions, among which this is one of the more interesting: "All-in-all Solaris is a powerful, stable, conformant-to-standards OS that can run many open source applications as well as Linux, and some (mainly multithreaded applications) better than Linux. Like in the cases of Red Hat and Suse, the cost of support is extra, but it is more reasonably priced. Security patches are free which makes Solaris similar to Windows."
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Member since:2006-01-24
So you are saying I can download any Linux distribution off the internet and just install it on an Altix box with 512 cpus without modifying the kernel or recompiling it and expect it to work without batting an eyelid?? Have you used it in such a situation yourself?
I know I can download Solaris 10 from the Sun website and use it on my one processor workstation and my 64 processor server out of the box (maximum I have used it on) No modifications necessary. This is what they meant by scalability.
Edited 2006-06-14 22:29
Member since:2006-01-03
"So you are saying I can download any Linux distribution off the internet and just install it on an Altix box with 512 cpus without modifying the kernel or recompiling it and expect it to work without batting an eyelid?"
I remember reading a post from an SGI engineer on fedora-devel where he explicitly stated that they were able to boot the stock (Itanium) Fedora kernel on a 512-CPU box. This was around FC2, BTW.
But the best results are probably only obtained by patching the kernel, which is common practice on Linux-land where no distribution ships the vanilla kernel.
Member since:2006-06-15
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So you are saying I can download any Linux distribution off the internet and just install it on an Altix box with 512 cpus without modifying the kernel or recompiling it and expect it to work without batting an eyelid??"
I believe debian for x86 doesn't work as well as SLES9 for Itanium.
Member since:2005-07-07
So you are saying I can download any Linux distribution off the internet and just install it on an Altix box with 512 cpus without modifying the kernel or recompiling it and expect it to work without batting an eyelid?? Have you used it in such a situation yourself?
So do you have a 512 CPU machine lying around? Are you going to install an OS you downloaded from the internet to install on a supercomputer? Are you crazy? Linux scales just fine thank you. If you want a 1024 CPU machine running Linux you can have one (you can even get 2048 if you want!). If you want an 8 way machine you can have one of those too. If you want a laptop you can have that, even a wristwatch running Linux if you would like. I call that scalability.
I know I can download Solaris 10 from the Sun website and use it on my one processor workstation and my 64 processor server out of the box (maximum I have used it on) No modifications necessary. This is what they meant by scalability.
Oh did I forget to mention that you can download Linux off the net and put it on a 64 CPU machine if you would like. Take a look at this article:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39184546,00.htm
Pay special attention to this statement:
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.
"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."
And this one:
"The 2.6 kernel is NUMA aware," said Cabaniols. Some patching was necessary, he said, but "all patches developed for the BigTux project are going into the mainstream Linux kernel and are included in standard distributions."
Member since:
2005-07-07
SGI's Altix supports up to 1024 processors and it runs on Linux.