In January 2003, SGI announced the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers. As announced, the SGI Altix 3000 system supported up to 64 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 512 GB of main memory in a single Linux image. Altix now supports up to 256 processors in a single Linux system, and we have a few early-adopter customers who are running 512 processors in a single Linux system; others are running with as much as 4 terabytes of memory. This paper continues the work reported on in our 2003 OLS paper by describing the changes necessary to get Linux to efficiently run high-performance computing workloads on such large systems.

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