OSDev.org

Hi,
I was wandering if the OS for a supercomputer has anything different about the kernel, or does all the messaging and such for all the connected nodes happen elsewhere?

I think the kernel would have some very hardware specific scheduling and IO so that it can balance the load across the different CPUs.
There would also have to be some mechanism of sharing memory from one CPU to another (assuming each CPU gets x amount of memory dedicated to it.)

Perhaps the supercomputer would be made up of smaller systems - perhaps have several multi-CPU systems, and use a network of some sort to communicate to other mutli-CPU systems to share the load and resources.

Well, more important might be how do I connect a lot of cpus together, how do I balance load across the cpus (and yes, you won't find 1000+ CPUs in one system, there will be a network, 10G Ethernet or InfiniBand) etc.

Even studying Hybercubes might be more helpful first then to start thinking about kernels.

Well, I read some nodes on Bluegene/L Systems have a custom singletasking OS to do the numbercrunching ...