A performance comparison of Linux and a lightweight kernel

Author

Brightwell, Ron ; Riesen, Rolf ; Underwood, Keith ; Hudson, Trammell B. ; Bridges, Patrick ; Maccabe, Arthur B.

Author_Institution

Sandia Nat. Labs., Albuquerque, Mexico

fYear

2003

fDate

1-4 Dec. 2003

Firstpage

251

Lastpage

258

Abstract

In this paper, we compare running the Linux operating system on the compute nodes of ASCI Red hardware to running a specialized, highly-optimized lightweight kernel (LWK) operating system. We have ported Linux to the compute and service nodes of the ASCI Red supercomputer, and have run several benchmarks. We present performance and scalability results for Linux compared with the LWK environment. To our knowledge, this is the first direct comparison on identical hardware of Linux and an operating system designed specifically for large-scale supercomputers. In addition to presenting these results, we discuss the limitations of both operating systems, in terms of the empirical evidence as well as other important factors.

Keywords

Unix; network operating systems; operating system kernels; software performance evaluation; workstation clusters; ASCI Red hardware; ASCI Red supercomputer; Linux; computer nodes; highly-optimized lightweight kernel operating system; large-scale supercomputers; Bridges; Hardware; Kernel; Laboratories; Large-scale systems; Linux; Network operating systems; Operating system kernels; Operating systems; Scalability; Software performance; Storms; Supercomputers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Cluster Computing, 2003. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2066-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/CLUSTR.2003.1253322

Filename

1253322