RE: [MLUG] what is IBM's linux?

[Dave Lloyd <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Michael wrote:

> Linux has countless package management tools. How does IRIX's differ from
> RPM? Could be there is already one similar to IRIX's and if not there
> probably will be eventually. Package management is one of the oldest bits
> of Linux but is still evolving nicely.

Inst gives you a nice, scriptable shell that actually works.  You can update
hundreds of packages at a time, and resolve all your conflicts before a
single package gets installed.  Trust me, inst is way better.  Ask any of
the other IRIX admin types here.

> 
> I don't understand what you mean by the kernel internals? Could you
> explain in more detail?

Not if I value being employed.

> 
> I don't know if I can see a point in supporting massive numbers of
> processors in a single system. Server clusters seem to me to be more
> scalable, cleaner to support, and the way things are headed. They seem to
> be working on that portion of Linux anyway and I know you can configure it
> for big server support but I really don't see it being all that important.

Right.  It depends on what you do.  If your code breaks up into nice, little
chunks, then it's great.  NFS, HTTP, DNS, etc, are all like this, too.  The
only advantage a big box would have is more CPUS to handle all your i/o 
interrupts.  Or, to be more pertinent to the target market, if you do 
optimization for molecular structures and each node has its own small, finite
dataset and you're primarly CPU bound rather than memory bound,  and your 
individual processess don't have to share data or memory, then a cluster is
great.  If you have an infinite amount of time to optimize your code to run
that way, it's good, too.  Note that "infinite amount of time" clause.  
I'd like to state that NOT EVERYTHING WORKS WELL ON A CLUSTER!  If you have
a lot of free man hours (like physics graduate students), then it makes more
sense than if you run a national lab or a manufacturing company that 
actually has to pay its employees.

Large single system image machines are good for people who do things like
weather simulations, computational fluid dynamics (think virtual, real-time
wind tunnels), or, in this case, too, anyone that requires *huge* amounts
of i/o.  They're also a better general purpose compute intensive solution
than clusters.  Notice I said general purpose.  Sometimes clusters will
be cheaper--that's why people make them.  But they're very, very far from
the end-all be-all of computing.  Grand challenge computing problems 
require the sorts of machines that SGI builds.  Why else would Fleet
Numeric Ocenographic (weather prediction), Nasa Ames (virtual wind tunnel,
CFD), Nasa Goddard (weather prediction), and various and sundry other
large customers buy 512p Origin 3000s?

--dlloyd

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