Cluster Upgrade Strategy

[Dean Johnson]

On Fri, 2002-10-18 at 02:05, Joachim Worringen wrote:
> Donald Becker:
> > In the Scyld Beowulf system (well, specifically the professional
> > editions) we ship six different kernel variously optimized for
> > Pentium-4, Athlon, and uniprocessor/SMP.  And with the current system
> 
> Can you elaborate on the actual performance differences/gains that these 
> kernels show? The things that I would optimize are memcpy() and maybe libm - 
> but do you really need different kernels for this? Function ptrs should do 
> the job. What else benefits from optimizations?
> 

I believe that its CPU specific optimizations such as scheduling and the
like. I have heard of observable performance increases when building
specifically for the Athlon, but I don't have direct experience myself.

	-Dean