computation-friendly kernels

Bevan C. Bennett bevan at fulcrummicro.com
Thu Jan 8 20:16:17 UTC 2004


Alexander Dalloz wrote:

> You mean not Severn, which was a Fedora beta, but you mean Taroon. I
> just checked that over the kernel version you give and that matches.

Oops. Indeed I meant Taroon. Too many nonsensical (to me) names...

> 4 times up to 20 times faster on Taroon compared to Fedora Core 1 is
> amazingly. Are you running one specific multithreaded application or a
> set of those? How do you measure the time it takes - by "time program"?

Yes, I've just been doing some basic profiling with 'time program' using 
one specific multithreaded (Java-based) application with various input 
files. To be more exact, I only see the differences on the largest of 
these sample cases, less intensive runs show a smaller difference.

FC1.3 runs...
realtime: 2128s 2271s 7418s
usertime:  693s  697s  748s

Taroon runs...
realtime:  735s  765s
usertime:  693s  728s

> The RHEL kernel is very optimized for big machines with much RAM,
> multiprozessors and so on. Can you describe your machine park a little
> bit?

8 x dual 2.8 GHz Dell PowerEdge 1750
8 x dual 2.4 GHz Dell PowerEdge 2650
8 x dual 2.2 GHz Dell PowerEdge 2650
8 x dual 1.2GHz IBM eServers
12 x dual 1.2GHz Dell PowerEdge 2550

all systems have 2GB of RAM
The testing was done primarily using the 1750s, but I get comparable 
results from the 2650s. Most of the pool is still running RH7.3 and I'm 
trying to figure out the best upgrade path for them (these tests don't 
even run without NPTL).

>>Any informed suggestions from the community?
> Maybe you should post you question on the fedora-devel list. It seems
> the Redhat folks are paying there more attention to such questions than
> here.

Thanks. I'll probably want to write up a slightly more technically 
complete version for that venue. Here I'm mostly hoping for general 
kernel-analysis advice.





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