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:2005-07-06
So, to them, they likely aren't comparing apples and oranges. They just don't know the difference between apples and oranges, and haven't had a taste of either, so they just talk out their tail-end about what they *think* based on their obviously highly-educated guesses.
Babe, its known as what I like to call, 'the google effect' where by they scream, "hey! google can do that!" when ever they wish to diss Solaris, big iron midframes/mainframes.
Bascule had a good post explaining the differences, comparing the Google approach to a big iron running Oracle - too bad the Linux fanboys (and girls) can't be bothered getting tuned into it.
Member since:2005-10-09
"Babe"? Please, out of respect for me, don't call me that.
Other than that, yes - concur, that's generally what happens. Latency doesn't mean a thing for some parallel jobs, to others it does. The jobs cited for examples don't require extremely low latency between processors.
Something that requires in-order parallel processing wouldn't be well suited to the "Google" style of clustering cheap boxes. When a reply might take an extra 1ms to get where it's going, it can mean the difference between working and not working. Oh well. There are things somewhere in the middle (SGI), and then there are highly vertical scalable monster boxes from Sun. Of course you can find examples of each from other manufacturers, just using these as well known examples.
Member since:2006-01-03
"People no longer seem capable of differentiating between the two. Most people here wouldn't know what NUMA was if it bit them in the tail."
This pops up every single time one talks about Linux scalability to large number of CPUs, and it's annoying...
SMP and ccNUMA ("cc" - cache coherent - being the important thing here) are basically the same thing, a bunch of CPUs running a *single* system image, which means the same locking contention problems appear on both architectures, albeit with differences.
The difference between the two is the memory access, which (like the name says) doesn't have uniform latencies/speeds for every address. ccNUMA schedulers are basically SMP schedulers that have to take memory locality into consideration.
SMP and ccNUMA are hardware architecture choices: on the SMP side the designer wants to make things simpler for the OS and optimizes for processes accessing mostly the same data, on the ccNUMA side the designer wants to maximize memory access bandwidth and optimizes for processes accessing their own data.
But in any case, all processes will have to make system calls, do IPC, and that where kernel scalability comes into play (together with making the best choices for memory allocations, CPU affinity, etc).
As to actual hardware...
A 512-CPU SGI Altix physically is a bunch of boxes with a couple of CPUs and memory, connected by an high-speed bus (NUMAflex on the Altix, if I recall correctly), but a big classic SMP box is also a bunch of cards with CPUs connected by an high-speed bus (but without any local memory).
The Opteron is ccNUMA, the Xeon isn't. What's the difference between scaling well to an n-way Xeon machine or an n-way Opteron? Get the picture?...
Moral of the story: 512-CPU SGI beasts AREN'T CLUSTERS.
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/numa/Linux_Scalability_for_Large_NUMA_O...
The big problem here is Solaris fanboys are so used to their "nothing scales like Solaris" idea that they mix hardware issues with software issues.
"The first killer app was VisiCalc. This early spreadsheet turned the Apple II from a hobbyist toy to a business computer. VisiCalc came with room for improvement, though. In addition, a new architecture and operating system, the Intel-based IBM PC and MS-DOS, also needed a spreadsheet to be taken seriously. That spreadsheet, released in early 1983, would be Lotus 1-2-3, and it would change the world. It became the PC's killer app, and the world would never be the same. On May 14, IBM quietly announced the end of the road for 1-2-3, along with Lotus Organizer and the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Lotus 1-2-3's day is done." Impressive 30 year run.
"There's a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company's tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they're holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International, which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world. AOI hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in the world for the last five years, yet it earned $30 billion in income from 2009 to 2012, according to a Senate report released yesterday." Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's just. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many more - these companies might not be breaking any laws, but it's obvious to anyone that what they are doing is scummy.
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Member since:
2005-10-09
People no longer seem capable of differentiating between the two. Most people here wouldn't know what NUMA was if it bit them in the tail.
Horizontal scalability is all people that have grown up in the late 90s/early 00s know. Vertical scalability is a thing of a past to them (actually, most of them have seem to have no idea what it is..)
So, to them, they likely aren't comparing apples and oranges. They just don't know the difference between apples and oranges, and haven't had a taste of either, so they just talk out their tail-end about what they *think* based on their obviously highly-educated guesses.