[Beowulf] performance differences between distros?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2004 at 09:03:13AM -0700, David Mathog wrote:

> I'm going to guess that comes down primarily to the choice of kernel
> and the modules in that kernel, and that differs between distros.

A kernel makes a big difference for apps that spend a lot of time in
the OS. Microbenchmarks like stream don't. For stream in particular,
if you're running on a NUMA machine, then the layout of memory does
matter a lot. But 2.6 plus a user-level utility to clue the OS that
you want local memory works fine. If you're doing MPI over TCP/IP, you
might see some differences, but not much.

In short: you probably won't discover much.

-- greg