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Date:      Tue, 5 Dec 2006 16:06:49 -0600
From:      Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org>
To:        freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Cc:        pete wright <nomadlogic@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: Venting my frustration with FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <200612051606.50137.josh@tcbug.org>
In-Reply-To: <57d710000612051336y60823c77ta4143645529c1878@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <200612041443.15154.josh@tcbug.org> <200612051509.58788.josh@tcbug.org> <57d710000612051336y60823c77ta4143645529c1878@mail.gmail.com>

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On Tuesday 05 December 2006 15:36, pete wright wrote:
> On 12/5/06, Josh Paetzel <josh@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

What sort of 'normal' user has access to that kind of hardware?

Of course they aren't running a stock kernel or distro, but neither 
are a lot of the guys using linux on real-time embedded hardware.  
Google doesn't run a stock kernel or distro either, and Verio and 
Yahoo don't run stock FreeBSD distributions or kernels either.

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel



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