[GreenKeys] OT - Highly stealthy Linux trojan may have infected victims for years...

[Chris Elmquist]

On Wednesday (12/10/2014 at 08:58PM -0000), Dave G4UGM wrote:
> 
> That's pretty much true, but generally it is not Linux as we know it. It's a
> special customized kernel that allows many processors and cores to be
> efficiently utilized. 

Well, actually, no.  This is somewhat true for a dying handful of IBM
and Cray platforms, but the system I architected at SGI, which was #3 on
Top 500 in 2009, runs off-the-shelf SuSE Linux.  This system sustained
478 TFlops with 6400, dual-cpu, quad-core Xeon processors with 16 TB of
real memory at that time.  That system,

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/pleiades.html

has been significantly expanded but continues to run a standard
off-the-shelf Linux distribution.

These systems are clusters where the total number of cores is what reside
in a single node.  Only the large shared memory designs, which fewer and
fewer customers want (or can afford) require micro-kernels or custom
kernel work.   SGI has put the support into the mainline Linux kernel
to support at least 2048 CPUs in a single system image anyway so it's
really not that specialized anymore if you do need it.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/how-many-cores-can-linux-kernel-handle

> If anyone is interested in such machines there is some info about the ones
> in the Hartree Centre at Daresbury, Cheshire, England, close to where I live
> here:-
> 
> http://community.hartree.stfc.ac.uk/wiki/site/admin/resources.html#bgq

There might be some interesting machines near Cheltenham too ;-)

-- 
Chris Elmquist