although, lots of enterprise NT customers want to scale their network
servers by running them on 4-way and 8-way hardware. i'd think that
this type of configuration might become more interesting over time,
especially if Beowulf-style clusters aren't an option for certain types
of network servers.
what's the difference between an n-way cluster and an n-way SMP, besides
cost and shared memory bandwidth? won't this also change over time as
NUMA becomes more economical?
garloff@kg1.ping.de says:
> Basically there are different mechanisms which limit the speed of operation:
> (1) CPU(s) speed
> (2) Memory speed (and size)
> (3) I/O (Network, HD, VGA, ...)
>
> By increasing the number of CPUs, you only do something about (1). So only
> CPU bound processes may profit.
isn't it true that, at least in the latest development versions of
Linux, each CPU can handle an interrupt concurrently with others?
wouldn't that imply that scaling CPUs might also scale I/O capacity,
as long as the system bus could keep up?
linker@z.ml.org says:
> Well.. The question was of Linux's SMP scalability in general, not just
> running a single app.. When running multiple differnt apps your
> bottlenecks are serialization in the kernel, and IO.
you would also want a single multi-threaded application to take
good advantage of multiple CPUs.
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