Hi everyone I'm here at SBAC-PAD (that's an International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing). I've been attending various interesting talks and though I'd share a couple with you.
Earlier today I attended a talk by prof.Kunle Olukotun about transactional memory, and got curious as to what this group might have to say about it. He mentioned that his group is testing it with FPGAs and getting some good results. Another curious thing, at the end of his talk, someone asked him what would be the implications to operating systems in this world of multi-core processors. He said that OS'es are picking up very slowly, and that in Niagara's case, the scheduler was using a lot of cores just to schedule things around when it first came out. He didn't mention which OS. I'll try to talk to him personally tomorrow, couldn't get to him today. Yesterday, a guy from Google (and Luis Barroso, remotely) talked about power consumption and efficiency for their warehouse-servers (or land-held computers). He spent most of the time talking about how their load average is at 30-45% most of the time and that the machines are wasting electricity by not adapting to that. His numbers pointed that the CPU is the most efficient component though, and that HDs and network cards were just wasting power away. But as always, they showed the problem and where they would like to be, but nothing about what they are doing to address those issues. Except that they are spec'ing their own PSU's. According to their numbers, regular PSU's waste at least half of the input current just converting it to a usable level. If you have any thoughts on these topics, I'd love to hear it. Rafael _______________________________________________ perf-discuss mailing list perf-discuss@opensolaris.org
