A friend just sent this to me, and while not quite 10 years old :), it is
MOST interesting!
****************
** Scaling Supercomputers With Linux
Up in the wilds of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where the nights grow
cold in August, a band of ex-Cray Research engineers is cooking
up what could be a hot answer to Linux's scalability
shortcomings. Cray's former chief architect for massively
parallel processor systems, Steve Oberlin, is CEO of Unlimited
Scale Inc. Working out of his home in Chippewa Falls, Wis., and
employing fewer than a dozen former Cray colleagues in South St.
Paul, Minn., Oberlin says his new company, formed last year, aims
to build a Linux architecture for scaling supercomputers made of
low-cost nodes.
It's an important challenge, as financial-services companies,
life-sciences firms, and oil-exploration companies seek to build
high-performance systems from low-cost components, often running
the Linux operating system. "Clusters today represent another
step along the price-performance curve," Oberlin says.
But it's not easy trying to build scalable systems from commodity
hardware designed for assembling desktop computers and small
servers. "Lashing together tens or hundreds of thousands of
processors isn't as easy as it appears when you apply it to
real-world problems," says Gary Smaby, a supercomputing analyst
and a principal of Quatris Fund, an investor in Unlimited Scale.
As the number of CPUs in a Beowulf-style cluster--a group of PCs
linked via Ethernet--increases and memory is distributed instead
of shared, the efficiency of each processor drops as more are
added.
Enter Oberlin. Unlimited's solution involves tailoring Linux
running on each node in a cluster, rather than treating all the
nodes as peers. The idea is to free some computers from getting
bogged down in processing-interrupt requests from peripherals,
while letting a second set of machines run the full operating
system, furnishing the cluster with networking, job scheduling,
input/output, and other capabilities. Says Oberlin, "On
application nodes, you want the operating system to get out of
the way." - Aaron Ricadela
Get more background at
Linux On Steroids
<A
HREF="
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=aD2J0BchqN0V20Pyt0Aq">
informationweek.com/thisweek/story/IWK20010628S0019</A>
IBM To Build Linux Supercomputer For NCSA
<A
HREF="
http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=aD2J0BchqN0V20PE40Au">
informationweek.com/story/IWK20010117S0011</A>
Received on Mon Jul 16 2001 - 23:32:37 BST