Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 13:54:16 -0400 From: Lance M.Westerhoff <lancew@psu.edu> To: freebsd-cluster@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: CPU-intensive Kernel Optimizations Message-ID: <91142972-8864-11D6-AD49-00039357F10C@psu.edu>
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Hello All- Forgive me as I am relatively new to freeBSD. This may not be the right forum to discuss this issue, so please feel free to point me in the right direction. First, a little background (and perhaps an introduction). I am a grad student and the primary sys admin in the Merz Research Group here at PennState University (http://merz.chem.psu.edu/). Up until recently, we had only really used IRIX-based SGIs to run our high performance, computational biochemistry code. In the past few months, we have been researching and buying new equipment to take the place of our aging SGIs. We ended up buying 20 dual processor AMDs (plus a 2TB RAID). Now that I am in the midst of preparing and clustering these new boxes together for production use, I am having trouble getting the processor performance that I would expect from these machines. So far these 1.67 GHz Athlons are only moderately faster, per processor, then a 1.2 GHz Athlon I benchmarked before making the purchase. Since as far as I can tell, other then the processor speeds, the rest of the hardware between the two machines is the same (ie: DDR memory, SCSI disk, etc). The only obvious difference I can see is that I am trying to use FreeBSD instead of the Linux that was installed on the benchmark machine. After researching the two OSs for a couple of articles I wrote for a Darwin/Mac OS X site (see http://www.applelust.com/alust/terminal/terminal_index.shtml for more info), I have decided that for this new cluster, I would like to give FreeBSD a try instead of Linux. In fact, I am happy to report that I have switched all of our x86 workstations from Linux to FreeBSD with complete success...now it would be nice for our new AMD cluster to go the same route. Ultimately, though, I need to go with performance. So, without further ado, here is my question. I assume that since this is a clustering list, there are probably at least a few people out there that could give me a few pointers on system/kernel tuning (or at least point me in the right direction). Understand that most of the system tuning I have had to do in the past has been for Linux and SysV derived OSs such as IRIX. Does anyone know of some good sources on the web? So far everything I have found has been for tuning the kernel for web performance. Unfortunately, the kind of performance we need is very different from the kind of performance required for web applications. Does anyone know of any good kernel options I should be compiling in (or out)? etc? Thanks in advance! -Lance To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message
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