Re: Hight Performance Computing

[Mindaugas Rasiukevicius <rmind%netbsd.org@localhost>]

Hello,

> 1. What is the maximum number of CPUs supported per mother board for AMD
> port?

32 CPUs without any tuning are supported and known to be working well.
For more, certain code changes would be needed.

> 2. What is the maximum amount of RAM supported by AMD per mother
> board?

If you mean amd64 port, then it the only limitation is 64-bit architecture.
Using many gigabytes of RAM should work well.

> 3. What is the status of Giant Lock in NetBSD? Is there are new scheduler in
> pipe for NetBSD 6.0 or later like ULE in FreeBSD.

NetBSD 5.0 has a fully fine-grained kernel core (as well as rewritten
threading and scheduling subsytems).  More how it scales in comparison to
other operating systems can be found here:

http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50/

There are some parts where kernel/giant-lock is still used, like drivers
or networking subsytem.  There are plans to make major improvements in
these areas for 6.0 or 7.0 release.

> 8. Is ZFS fully production ready?
> 

ZFS is supported in -current, it cannot yet be called production ready.
Work is being done to stabilise ZFS for 6.0 release.

> 9. Is DTrace being ported to NetBSD?
> 

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2010/02/15/msg007333.html

-- 
Mindaugas