>After some pricing disputes with SGI, we're thinking of scrapping our
>plans to purchase a 4 processor Origin 200 in favor of a quad-Xeon box of
>some sort (like the Dell Poweredge 6300).
>How well does Linux perform in such an environment? Is a quad-400Mhx Xeon
>at all comprable to a quad-225Mhz R10k Origin 200? I'd be especially
>interested in hearing from people who have experience with Linux and
>multi-processor equipment from SGI or Sun.
We compared in our University a single process (a chess player) running is a
Octane 2xR10000 against a UP Linux on a PII 233. The program is totally
programmed in ANSI C. We compiled using O2 option on Linux and all 64 bits
optimization on the Octane. In the same period of time, the Linux version
did 180.000 operations, Octane about 100.000 (take in account is a single
threaded process).
IMHO, I don't like very much 2.0.x kernels on SMP, I would prefer to start
directly in 2.1.xxx, specially if you have a quad. It seems that from
2.1.124 a lot of things have been changed to the "right" way. I am not a
hacker, but I read many messages from Linus and Co., and it seems there is a
short path to 2.2.
Finally, SGI is going to change radically in few months, they are going to
sell NT machines with Intel processors. MIPS factory has been sold months
ago and IRIX sucks, specially with incompatibilities among SMP/UP and
R5000/R10000 processors (and lots of bugs, stupid/expensive development
package and typical hardware problems with SCSIs and graphic boards).
Furthermore, you can have OpenGL, OpenInventor libraries for Linux and very
inexpensive openGL card that are comparable in performance to SGIs (and a
lot cheaper).
--ricardo
