3 posts tagged “unix”

Redhat

Keep in mind this is from Red Hat Magazine, but hey...  ;-)

While many people are aware of SPEC benchmarks, they may be unfamiliar with the SPECompM and SPECompL series of benchmarks. These are used for characterizing the OpenMP shared memory performance in medium and large systems. OpenMP itself is a specification for compilers and libraries to make use of parallel directives. The types of problems this benchmark models are largely scientific in nature, covering everything from automobile crash simulation to ocean modeling to computational chemistry to genetics.

Many of these problems cannot be solved efficiently in a grid and still require shared memory multiprocessing resources. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been hugely successful in grid computing, its success in Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) has not been publicized as much.

SPEC OMP is of interest to High-performance computing (HPC) users, providing an objective and representative benchmark suite for measuring the performance of SMP systems. The focus is to deliver systems performance results appropriate for real scientific and engineering applications, so the benchmark places heavy demands on the processor, shared memory architecture, compiler and the OpenMP implementation. There are two OPM variants: OMPM2001 for 1-32 processor systems, and OMPL2001 for larger systems.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 SPECompM2001 result is the world record for a 16-way SMP configuration, and used an IBM POWER system that delivered a result of 45,895 - an incredible 78% faster than the previous Linux record holder. It is also a whole lot faster than the competing Unix results: 210% over Sun Solaris, 132% over HP/UX.

Many people are unaware of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s ability to optimize large memory configurations, schedule across large numbers of CPU’s, and offer the compilers and libraries tuned to this problem space. So this benchmark is a terrific proof point for people who were waiting for Linux to mature in SMP space.

While commodity multiprocessors and server designs are cost optimized for the best price performance, large SMP systems are designed with performance as the prime goal. The ability to simulate an automobile crash in a computer, rather than building an actual model allows engineers to design a lightweight, yet strong car and iterate the design many times. This gives maximum safety and yet the light weight allows great fuel efficiency. Likewise the ability to model chemical properties in a computer allows tests for strength, toxicity, and cost of manufacture saves many times the costs of the computing systems.

This great result, beating all previous Linux results, shows the power and suitability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the scientific environment.

AIX

<ln -sf /usr/lib/boot/unix_mp /unix>
<ln -sf /usr/lib/boot/unix_mp /usr/lib/boot/unix>
<lslv -m hd5>
<bosboot -ad /dev/ipldevice>
<shutdown -Fr>
<bootinfo -K> (should now be 32)

Virtualization

There's plenty of good reads on Scott Lowe's blog and I just finished one on his and other's thinking of the future of operating systems:

I do agree with these conclusions on at least one point:  The general purpose operating system as we know it will cease to exist in the next 5 to 10 years, perhaps sooner.  I do believe that the release of massive development projects such as Windows Vista won’t be the norm moving forward and that, in fact (as others have predicted as well), Windows Vista will be the last of its kind.

Notice I didn’t place Mac OS X in that list as well.  Why?  Because I think that Apple is capitalizing on an architecture and a convergence of technology that allows it to make Mac OS X into what Windows NT was supposed to be.  (Go back and read the stories about the development of Windows NT and look at Dave Cutler’s vision for the operating system—an application environment-agnostic system in which OS/2, Windows, and POSIX-compliant applications could all run without modification.)  Does that sound like anything else we have these days?  With Mac OS X today, I can run native Macintosh applications, command-line UNIX applications (sometimes straight “out of the box”, sometimes needing a quick recompile), and X11-based applications.  Add in something like WINE (the open source Win32 API implementation) and we gain the ability to run many (but not all) Windows applications.  Add in a virtualization solution such as that created by VMware or Parallels and you gain the ability to run any Windows application.

Read the rest here.