Tunning Freebsd for clustering

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2007, Emanuel Marufo wrote:

> Hi everybody:
>
> I recently work with mpi on FBSD 6.2 and Centos 4.4 on the same hardware.
>
> 2 Woodcrest dual core 3Ghz
> 2 GB RAM.
> 150 GB SATA disc.
> etc, etc.
>
>
> My tests, about network and hard disk transfers, say Centos is faster
> than FBSD.
>
> My questions are, how can tunning FBSD to upgrade the performance for
> clustering?. And why Centos do have better performance?.
>
> NOTE: The two tests on the fbsd was better are floating point
> operations and recursitivity, i was impresed with a better managing of
> it.

Don't count out 7-CURRENT. It's basically frozen now awaiting release sometime within the next couple months and is much better at dealing with concurrency than 6.2, in particular if you use the ULE scheduler instead of the 4BSD scheduler.

Latest copies of 7-CURRENT also include gcc 4.2.1 which is a lot better than gcc 3.4.2 with later edition processors (like the Woodcrest Xeons for instance), with dealing with larger processor caches IIRC.

There may be some things though in Linux which do run faster though, but please remember that performance is a function of many different factors, and your experience may vary from others who've done experiments before you.

Cheers,
-Garrett