Just saw a review of System76 Thelio Astra (Ampere Altra). An arm64 system with 128 cores and 512GB of memory for under $7500. NIX's model seems more and more applicable to commodity hardware.
On Fri, Jan 3, 2025, 11:11 AM Ron Minnich <rminn...@p9f.org> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 1, 2025 at 4:35 AM <tlaro...@kergis.com> wrote: > > Is the number of TC fixed, or is it at least one TC and the number > > can increase if needed (or, put it differently, can a AC, if needed, > > switch to a TC and vice-versa)? > > Fixed, I believe, at boot time? I no longer recall. Nemo and lsub did > experiment > with dynamic counts, but I came from an HPC/LinuxBios background: > nodes boot in seconds, > so I did not worry about "fixed at boot time" type issues. Want to > change configuration? reboot. > Starting a new job? reboot. And so on. > > > Had you the opportunity to measure how "bad" some application > > workloads could be because the number of TC---after the > > initialization period---exceeded largely the number of AC with a not zero > > pointer? > > > > That would be good to do, now that we have machines with hundreds of cores. > > > Theoretically, could a machine with different kind of cores, perhaps with > > differing architectures (specialized cores) but sharing at least > > with a common MMU read/write (data) pages (for the kernel shared > > data: locks and so on) be possible, with a system such as NIX in fact > > scheduling to the matching kind of AC core for the task to be run? > > You have that already, nowadays, starting with big/little, and moving > to the intel > CPUs with widely varying core types. Esperanto has specialized cores too. > > I think having incompatible architectures is already there, too, with > GPUs and smart nics like the AWS and Google ones. > Well, hmm, that kind of "sharing with compatible MMU" was started by > quadrics in the 90s, so it's not new. > > This has been a very interesting discussion, thanks all. My offer > remains: if anyone wants to revive NIX, I am happy to help. > > ron ------------------------------------------ 9fans: 9fans Permalink: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T7692a612f26c8ec5-M719d20d891666bd4836e4a53 Delivery options: https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/subscription
