> On Wed, Oct 13, 1999 at 11:28:07AM +0200, avik@talmai.com wrote:
> ... (Taxonomy of MP machines)
> >
> > All true, but I lack the facilities to measure the performance
> > of my patch on a NUMA :(
> >
> > Does linux support a NUMA machine?
>
> I don't think Linux support for SPARC EnterpriseServer 10000 is
> very good. It sure runs, but all these memory locality optimization
> things are missing. DaveM could tell more.
>
> Sun has a few more alike boxes (as I understand them), for example
> E 4500 series.
>
In the tech article I just read from IEEE Micro one of the Sun engineers
specifically called out the Starfire (UE10K) series, as well as the rest of
the Ultra series as specifically UMA systems, not NUMA, let alone CC-NUMA.
Seeing as I'm from Compaq and that may make people wary of my technical
knowledge of Sun systems, I'll quote the article (by Alan Charlesworth, if
the name means anything :) :
"As with the rest of the Ultra server family, Starfire's
uniform-memory-access time is independent of the board where memory is
located." (p. 41)
(note to self: stop sounding like you're still in college...*grumble*)
That sentence, as well as the rest of the surrounding text, definitely makes
Starfire sound like it's UMA. And being that NUMA is one of my pet toys, I
can tell you that adding memory locality support (like memory replication
and/or relocation) is fun, but really hard to get right. If anyone wants,
sometime soon we'll be shipping a new system that's quite happy to run NUMA.
Just check out SKC, and look for "Wildfire". All I'm allowed to say is
"fast...really fast". And yes, I've been poking people around here to clone
a couple copies of Jay so we can have Linux support on the system.
Anyway, back to the topic...I'm going to go back to my
Alpha-hasn't-booted-2.3-since-10-on-rawhide hole now and try to tackle some
fun stuff. (Yes, that was a subtle hint for someone with more of a clue to
correct me on that one).
- Pete
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