Hi,
I’m new user of QNX Neutrino. I’m wondering how many multiple processors QNX
supports up to?
I was told that QNX Neutrino supports only up 8 processors. Is it true?
Thanks,
JinWoo
QNX can provide a more authoritative answer. I believe that current
delivered SMP version will work with 4, or maybe it is 2? I suspect
that the architecture is unlimited, and given QSSL’s penchant for
doing this type of thing right, probably less subject to diminishing
returns than most OS’s. That said, where are you going to get a board
that supports more than 8? I’ve seen (at a trade show) a very heavy duty machine
running NT that had many processors, but I think that they were Alpha’s.
Previously, Jin-Woo Lee wrote in qdn.public.qnxrtp.newuser:
Hi,
I’m new user of QNX Neutrino. I’m wondering how many multiple processors QNX
supports up to?
I was told that QNX Neutrino supports only up 8 processors. Is it true?Thanks,
JinWoo
\
–
Mitchell Schoenbrun --------- maschoen@pobox.com
Jin-Woo Lee <jl206@cornell.edu> wrote:
I’m new user of QNX Neutrino. I’m wondering how many multiple processors QNX
supports up to?
I was told that QNX Neutrino supports only up 8 processors. Is it true?
The current procnto-smp is compiled for up to 8 processor support. Given
a business case, we could take that up to 32 without too much in the
way of code changes (though I suspect we’d have some performance issues
to deal with). We’ve only tested with up to 4 processors though.
\
Brian Stecher (bstecher@qnx.com) QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
phone: +1 (613) 591-0931 (voice) 175 Terence Matthews Cr.
+1 (613) 591-3579 (fax) Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M 1W8
Am I correct in assuming, however, that after 4-8 CPUs, most machines are
using some sort of high speed backplane? I know that Sun’s Enterprise
machines use dual and quad boards connected through a backplane. I’m not
sure how the hardware presents itself though…does an OS need to know about
that fabric? Does it see 4 sets of 2 CPUs with 2GB RAM each or does it just
see an 8 cpu system with 8GB RAM? I know that the CRAY we had at Lakehead
could be configured either as a cluster of individual machines or one big
one…it had 40 CPUs though so I don’t see us running on that kind of big
iron soon. 
Kris
“Brian Stecher” <bstecher@qnx.com> wrote in message
news:a6afk0$7kt$1@nntp.qnx.com…
Jin-Woo Lee <> jl206@cornell.edu> > wrote:
I’m new user of QNX Neutrino. I’m wondering how many multiple processors
QNX
supports up to?
I was told that QNX Neutrino supports only up 8 processors. Is it true?The current procnto-smp is compiled for up to 8 processor support. Given
a business case, we could take that up to 32 without too much in the
way of code changes (though I suspect we’d have some performance issues
to deal with). We’ve only tested with up to 4 processors though.
\Brian Stecher (> bstecher@qnx.com> ) QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
phone: +1 (613) 591-0931 (voice) 175 Terence Matthews Cr.
+1 (613) 591-3579 (fax) Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M
1W8
Kris Warkentin <kewarken@qnx.com> wrote:
Am I correct in assuming, however, that after 4-8 CPUs, most machines are
using some sort of high speed backplane? I know that Sun’s Enterprise
machines use dual and quad boards connected through a backplane. I’m not
sure how the hardware presents itself though…does an OS need to know about
that fabric? Does it see 4 sets of 2 CPUs with 2GB RAM each or does it just
see an 8 cpu system with 8GB RAM? I know that the CRAY we had at Lakehead
could be configured either as a cluster of individual machines or one big
one…it had 40 CPUs though so I don’t see us running on that kind of big
iron soon. >
If the view of memory is not symmetrical between the CPU’s then you can’t
use procnto-smp (Symmetrical MultiProcessing, donch’a know 
.
A system that split the memory up between the processors would run
multiple independant OS’s in each of the memory regions (the SMP version
if more than one CPU used the piece of memory) and use QNET with a
special driver to talk to each other over the backplane.
–
Brian Stecher (bstecher@qnx.com) QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
phone: +1 (613) 591-0931 (voice) 175 Terence Matthews Cr.
+1 (613) 591-3579 (fax) Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M 1W8
I know our Enterprise 4500 (with the specs I was describing below) appeared
to us as 8way smp with 8GB contiguous memory. During POST you could see it
checking the individual boards and see how the memory on the boards was
being mapped to ranges from 0 to 8GB. I guess that answers my own
question - the hardware must present itself to the OS as a single machine.
The CRAY was a little freaky though - apparantly it could be partitioned of
into any combination of shared or distributed memory MIMD as well as SIMD
machines at the same time. In the end they just set it up as shared MIMD
since it seemed the simplest way to use it. Oddly enough, they never
deactivated my account. Here’s a snapshot of ‘top’ and the output of
‘df -h’. Yikes. Hey…maybe we should get our stuff building on
IRIX…this would make a good nightly build machine. Or rather, a 20 minutes
to ‘make world’ machine
IRIX64 giant 6.5 IP27 load averages: 14.00 14.00 14.00
10:23:25
209 processes: 194 sleeping, 15 running
40 CPUs: 0.0% idle, 0.0% usr, 0.0% ker, 0.0% wait, 0.0% xbrk, 0.0%
intr
Memory: 10G max, 9653M avail, 286M free, 10G swap, 10G free swap
PID PGRP USERNAME PRI SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU% CPU%
COMMAND
7521 7521 rwei 20 2544K 1152K run/6 161.6H 0.1 0.06
a.out
7452 7452 rwei 20 2528K 1136K run/7 160.6H 0.1 0.06
a.out
80323 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/11 23.2H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80562 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/9 22.7H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80553 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/8 22.7H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80547 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/10 22.7H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80556 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/2 22.7H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80555 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/3 22.7H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80551 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/0 22.5H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
80095 80312 phawryla 20 7344M 7209M run/1 22.5H 0.0 0.01
edimcm_
81644 4069 jtse 19 1224M 15M run/35 498:22 0.0 0.00
DLPOLY.
82219 4069 jtse 19 1224M 15M run/34 498:01 0.0 0.00
DLPOLY.
82230 4069 jtse 19 1224M 15M run/32 496:10 0.0 0.00
DLPOLY.
82194 4069 jtse 19 1224M 16M run/33 490:54 0.0 0.00
DLPOLY.
93773 93773 kewarken 20 2160K 1520K run/20 0:00 0.0 0.00 top
giant> df -h
Filesystem Type Size use avail %use Mounted on
/dev/root xfs 15G 13G 1.6G 90% /
/dev/dsk/dks10d1s6 xfs 14G 480K 14G 1% /tmp1
/dev/xlv/xlv_tmp xfs 34G 1.1M 34G 1% /usr/xlv_tmp
/dev/xlv/xlv3 xfs 85G 5.5G 79G 7% /disk3
/dev/xlv/xlv4 xfs 68G 6.0G 62G 9% /disk4
/dev/xlv/xlv2 xfs 85G 40G 45G 47% /disk2
/dev/xlv/xlv1 xfs 85G 45G 40G 54% /disk1
/dev/xlv/home xfs 46G 26G 20G 58% /usr/home
Kris
“Brian Stecher” <bstecher@qnx.com> wrote in message
news:a6aiin$9sg$1@nntp.qnx.com…
Kris Warkentin <> kewarken@qnx.com> > wrote:
Am I correct in assuming, however, that after 4-8 CPUs, most machines
are
using some sort of high speed backplane? I know that Sun’s Enterprise
machines use dual and quad boards connected through a backplane. I’m
not
sure how the hardware presents itself though…does an OS need to know
about
that fabric? Does it see 4 sets of 2 CPUs with 2GB RAM each or does it
just
see an 8 cpu system with 8GB RAM? I know that the CRAY we had at
Lakehead
could be configured either as a cluster of individual machines or one
big
one…it had 40 CPUs though so I don’t see us running on that kind of
big
iron soon. >If the view of memory is not symmetrical between the CPU’s then you can’t
use procnto-smp (Symmetrical MultiProcessing, donch’a know >A system that split the memory up between the processors would run
multiple independant OS’s in each of the memory regions (the SMP version
if more than one CPU used the piece of memory) and use QNET with a
special driver to talk to each other over the backplane.–
Brian Stecher (> bstecher@qnx.com> ) QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
phone: +1 (613) 591-0931 (voice) 175 Terence Matthews Cr.
+1 (613) 591-3579 (fax) Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M
1W8
I’m starting from the scratch.
I’m looking for 8 processor machines compatible with QNX as well.
If you have an experience with multi processors, please give me an
information about the hardware!
Thanks,
JinWoo
“Brian Stecher” <bstecher@qnx.com> wrote in message
news:a6afk0$7kt$1@nntp.qnx.com…
Jin-Woo Lee <> jl206@cornell.edu> > wrote:
I’m new user of QNX Neutrino. I’m wondering how many multiple processors
QNX
supports up to?
I was told that QNX Neutrino supports only up 8 processors. Is it true?The current procnto-smp is compiled for up to 8 processor support. Given
a business case, we could take that up to 32 without too much in the
way of code changes (though I suspect we’d have some performance issues
to deal with). We’ve only tested with up to 4 processors though.
\Brian Stecher (> bstecher@qnx.com> ) QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
phone: +1 (613) 591-0931 (voice) 175 Terence Matthews Cr.
+1 (613) 591-3579 (fax) Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M
1W8
I’m just guessing but of all the architectures we support, I would think
that mips, x86 and powerpc are the only ones that even EXIST in 8 way
configurations. Now, of the mips and powerpc chips that we support, I don’t
know if there exist large multi-cpu solutions for them and, even if there
were, I don’t believe we currently support smp on mips (although I know
Brian has some experimental smp stuff running on mips). Do we run smp on
ppc Brian? I think x86 would be just about your only viable solution and,
as was stated earlier, our testing has only gone as far as 4way. I’d be
curious to know a bit more about your project and how it is specifying both
QNX and 8 cpu’s. If it’s some sort of heavy computational task or a high
availability issue, you may want to consider multiple machines in a cluster.
cheers,
Kris
“Jin-Woo Lee” <jl206@cornell.edu> wrote in message
news:a6alm3$65t$1@inn.qnx.com…
I’m starting from the scratch.
I’m looking for 8 processor machines compatible with QNX as well.
If you have an experience with multi processors, please give me an
information about the hardware!Thanks,
JinWoo
“Brian Stecher” <> bstecher@qnx.com> > wrote in message
news:a6afk0$7kt$> 1@nntp.qnx.com> …
Jin-Woo Lee <> jl206@cornell.edu> > wrote:
I’m new user of QNX Neutrino. I’m wondering how many multiple
processors
QNX
supports up to?
I was told that QNX Neutrino supports only up 8 processors. Is it
true?The current procnto-smp is compiled for up to 8 processor support. Given
a business case, we could take that up to 32 without too much in the
way of code changes (though I suspect we’d have some performance issues
to deal with). We’ve only tested with up to 4 processors though.
\Brian Stecher (> bstecher@qnx.com> ) QNX Software Systems, Ltd.
phone: +1 (613) 591-0931 (voice) 175 Terence Matthews Cr.
+1 (613) 591-3579 (fax) Kanata, Ontario, Canada K2M
1W8
Previously, Kris Warkentin wrote in qdn.public.qnxrtp.newuser:
Do we run smp on ppc Brian?
You used to have a demo dual PPC running at the shows. It had some type
of graphical demonstration where one half the screen was one processor, and
the other half another.
Mitchell Schoenbrun --------- maschoen@pobox.com