Experience Of OS Optimization For Linpack On Dawning4000A

Summary form only given. Clusters equipped with Linux, a commonly available operating system, are very popular in the supercomputer industry. While as a general-purpose operating system, Linux probably contains some redundant properties that are unbefitting or unnecessary for HPC applications, and moreover, the design tradeoff cannot take some special applications´ features into account excessively. This has the potential to optimize Linux for special applications such as Linpack. In this paper, we present experiences of optimizing Linux for Linpack, which is a standard benchmark for supercomputer, on Dawning4000A - an HTFlops Linux/PC cluster system. Based on observation, the implementation of optimization involves three aspects: memory management system - superpage support, light little-noise kernel and process management system. Measurements show that superpage support produces 2-3 percent performance improvement, light little-noise kernel and optimization on process management give only faint or even negative performance advantage. Despite Linux, issues identified should be also relevant to other general-purpose operating systems