More on Scalability, Again

This week Intel announced its new Xeon E7 v4 processor, which takes x86_64 processor scale to another level: a single CPU socket now gives you 24 cores and access to 3TiB of RAM.  That means a medium-sized server of 8 sockets can now give you access to 192 cores and 24TiB RAM.  The upshot of this is that is you actually want to access all of that RAM with a supported operating system, SUSE Enterprise Linux is your only choice.

The new architecture also raises the limit for CPU sockets in a box to 64 – which means that you could max out this system in a standard kind of configuration at 1,536 cores. Again, SUSE Enterprise Linux is the only OS to support this degree of scalability for this kind of processor.

I wrote about this just a few weeks ago in the context of the HPE Integrity Superdome X,  which still only has published benchmarks running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. It's interesting to see that all of the numbers have doubles (yet again) in such a short time.

Of course, SGI has been doing this degree of scaling with NUMA systems for a while, which is why SUSE Enterprise Linux is known to scale to 8,192 CPU cores and 64TiB RAM (they couldn't fit in any more memory): it's a little frightening to consider what they might end up doing with these new CPU's – at the very least 128TiB RAM will be near on the horizon.

So when the processor hardware manufacturers can still drop a doubling of capacity on us, it's worthwhile taking a note of whether your software can deal with it....