Re: Supercomputer OS's

Frithiof Andreas Jensen wrote:


"Iwo Mergler" <Iwo.Mergler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

I suppose I should qualify "Linux port". In my understanding
that means porting the kernel. That usually involves adjusting
a few addresses and rewriting or adapting the low level
assembler stuff. Most new drivers tend to be unnecessary,
as most jellybean hardware is compatible with the same thing
on a different platform. It's not always obvious.

Keep Dreaming ;-)

This particular setup was a disk-less dual Opteron card (actually *using*
IPMI for syslog reporting to a manglement system). The card must reserve

<snipped interresting description>

The testing, fixing, workarounding and documenting of all the niglets and
failures take time. However we are now quite convinced that this system
*will* run for 10 years without a hard reboot and the customer knows how
to use it from the documentation!

Quite an impressive story. I still maintain that you didn't actually
port Linux (x86 was already supported on PC compatibles). You were
probably able to boot a standard distribution to start with.

What you did was a hell of a lot harder - creating a new OS based
on Linux, to do stuff Linux wasn't able to do initially. You did
very non standard things with a standard PC. I can see how this could
be relevant to supercomputers.

My experience is with completely new architectures - new ASIC designs,
incompatible with anything that went before. The aim is usually to
get 'normal' Linux running on them.


The build system takes a lot of time too - getting from the standard
kernel source and to the thing we ship in a sane way takes a lot of
design. Basically we do as RedHat does: take a standard kernel and patch
the hell out of it before the build. But just to make the process more
fragile and suck more disk and network bandwith, we must use Clearcase -
the corprat standard!

I can feel your pain...

Kind regards,

Iwo

.

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