Experience Of OS Optimization For Linpack On Dawning4000A

Summary form only given. Clusters equipped with Linux, a commonly available operating system, are very popular in the supercomputer industry. While as a general-purpose operating system, Linux probably contains some redundant properties that are unbefitting or unnecessary for HPC applications, and moreover, the design tradeoff cannot take some special applications' features into account excessively. This has the potential to optimize Linux for special applications such as Linpack. In this paper, we present experiences of optimizing Linux for Linpack, which is a standard benchmark for supercomputer, on Dawning4000A - an HTFlops Linux/PC cluster system. Based on observation, the implementation of optimization involves three aspects: memory management system - superpage support, light little-noise kernel and process management system. Measurements show that superpage support produces 2-3 percent performance improvement, light little-noise kernel and optimization on process management give only faint or even negative performance advantage. Despite Linux, issues identified should be also relevant to other general-purpose operating systems