Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

Mark Hahn
2003-02-22T21:56:20Z

> OK, so now you've slid from talking about PCs to 2-way to 4-way ...
> perhaps because your original arguement was fatally flawed.

oh, come on. the issue is whether memory is fast and flat.
most "scalability" efforts are mainly trying to code around the fact
that any ccNUMA (and most 4-ways) is going to be slow/bumpy.
it is reasonable to worry that optimizations for imbalanced machines
will hurt "normal" ones. is it worth hurting uni by 5% to give
a 50% speedup to IBM's 32-way? I think not, simply because
low-end machines are more important to Linux.

the best way to kill Linux is to turn it into an OS best suited
for $6+-digit machines.

> For applications that don't work well on clusters, you have no real

ccNUMA worst-case latencies are not much different from decent
cluster (message-passing) latencies. getting an app to work on a cluster
is a matter of programming will.

regards, mark hahn.