[Beowulf] SGI and Sun: In Memoriam

[Gerry Creager]

John Hearns wrote:
> 2009/4/1 Robert G. Brown <rgb at phy.duke.edu>:
>> Here, let me add a little spot of brandy to that cup.  They deserve at
>> least that... for it was upon their shoulders and out of their egg that
>> Linux was borne, as all the SunOS and Irix users in the Universe,
>> frustrated with high prices and incompatibility and stupid corporate
>> changes, leapt onto the Linux wagon in droves when the CBA started to
>> strongly favor it.
> 
> True.  Also well worth a mention here is SGIs porting of "big Unix"
> features to Linux, such as XFS,
> and thier pushing for big machine features in the Linux kernel, when
> Linux developers weren't thinking that big.
> Hence why we now can have single system image machines with terabytes
> of RAM working quite happily with the
> same kernels as run on your netbook.
> I'm quite serious here - if SGI had not donated a lot of their code,
> and helped push for big scalability I doubt that Linux would be ready
> for the multicore machines we see today.

And I'll drink to that.  Sans XFS, my Lab wouldn't run nearly as well, 
as we'd be doing a file check 'way too frequently on ext3.  And where 
we've had XFS problems, there's usually been hardware gremlins lurking, 
so we couldn't really blame the software.  Large memory footprint, too, 
has been invaluable.

Thanks, SGI.

gerry
-- 
Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University	
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