[Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists"

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 03:33:19PM -0400, Lawrence Stewart wrote:

> More specifically for HPC, linux seems designed for the desktop, and  
> for small
> memory machines.  Many of the decisions that made good sense in the '90s

In case of embedded-RAM nodes 'small' most likely would be ~MByte sized.
In that case, Linux is indeed quite unsuitable for small memory machines.
You'd end up burning almost all of your silicon real estate just for the
OS, which would also be a large overkill for the kind of asynchronous
message passing object soup you'd have on that hardware. (A minimal
Forth or Lisp OS would be probably more suitable).

> make no sense now.  512 byte disk sectors?  4096 byte pages?  Randomly

In case of embedded-RAM nodes, most nodes would have no disk at all.
Nor swap.

> allocated physical memory?  "large page" patches on small pages?
> All sorts of dinky little tasks waking up and generating OS noise to  
> clobber
> your collectives?

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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