Linux will be the main operating system for IBM’s upcoming family of “Blue Gene” supercomputers–a major endorsement for the operating system and the open-source computing model it represents.
It’s Linux for IBM Supercomputer Project
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Eugenia Loli
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Oh yeah! 🙂
-fooks
and the KERNEL they will use is what again.
Blue Gene/L, the first member of the family, will contain 65,000 processors
I’m sorry but I think the current monothic kernel is far from performing well with 64,999 other mircoprocessors!
>> I’m sorry but I think the current
>> monothic kernel is far from performing
>> well with 64,999 other mircoprocessors!
Don’t you see that as a gain? IBM will not make a decision like that if they do not think that it is suitable, and if they do not have the what it takes to make it work. The kernel is not cast in stone. Overcoming drawbacks in the kernel means the kernel would have been getting better than it is, which is great news.
I’m sorry but I think the current monothic kernel is far from performing well with 64,999 other mircoprocessors!
I hope you were joking! Everyone knows that SMP (the thing you have in mind) is only interesting for a relatively small number of processors. There are quite a few other techniques to support large amount of processors. NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Access) for example.
http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa/numa_faq.html
and specifically
http://lse.sourceforge.net/numa/numa_faq.html#numa_v_smp
-fooks
is there going to be one kernel spanning all 65,000 kernels? Or is it more of a cluster?
It’s just a guess, but… clusters.