Yet another entry in the Linux vs. Solaris scalability debate. This time it comes in Garrett D'Amore's blog "Scalability FUD", where he argues that, at least in the HPC arena, most operations involve "user" rather than "sys" time and, therefore, the calls to inter-thread synchronization are relatively few.
With its 1,088 computing cores, 100TB of data storage tied to a quad data rate Infiniband network and a quoted performance of 13 Teraflops at peak -- equivalent to up to thirteen trillion operations per second -- the new High Performance Computer at Scotland's University of Strathclyde, implemented by supplier Esteem Systems using Sun technology, enables the university's Faculty of Engineering to address complex problems in materials, fluid dynamics and design.
The Sun Storage Solutions white paper "Turbo-charging HPC Application Performance with Flash Storage: Changing the Focus from Processing to Moving Data Faster" contends that, with ever more CPU cores and more GFLOPS per core, HPC application performance will be determined by the ability to move data in and out of fast processors. This paper examines how Flash technology can be deployed and the effect it will have on HPC workloads. It examines various Flash technologies and compares their performance on leading HPC application benchmarks. Finally, the performance characteristics of the Flash-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System is described.
Following on his talk "HPC Trends and Virtualization," a presentation given at Sun's HPC Consortium in Hamburg recently, Josh Simons goes further with his blog post "Virtualization for HPC: The Heterogeneity Issue," a subject to which he takes an even-handed approach, conceding at the outset that " ... while heterogeneity is either desirable or to be avoided, depending on your viewpoint, virtualization can help in either case."
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