NUMA, Sequent NUMA-Q, etc

NUMA is something that's been on my mind a lot lately. Partially in seeding beastie ideas into Larry McVoy's brain. I asked Paul McKenney for some history on what went down at Sequent since that's before my time. He sent me this, which I think the group will enjoy: http://www2.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/techreports/stingcacm3.1999.08.04a.pdf It looks pretty nice. Not sure anyone's come as close as Irix to solving and productizing "easy" NUMA but that's the one I have the most hands on experience with. They can affine, place, migrate, and even replicate many types of resources including vnodes. I'm actually surprised all that code seems to have been spiked and it doesn't seem like either Sequent née IBM nor SGI brought forward any of their architecture to Linux. Paul did RCU which is a tour de force, but the Linux topology and MM code looks like the product of sustaining engineers instead of architectural decree. Maybe the SCO lawsuit snubbed all of that? HP has an out of date competitive analysis that's worth a look http://h20566.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?sp4ts.oid=5060289&do…02670417. I don't have enough seat time with Tru64 but maybe they had some good ideas. As open source, I do like Illumos' locality groups. I can't make much sense of Linux on this, too much seems to be in arch/ vs a first class concept like locality groups. Regards, Kevin