On 2 Sep 2018, at 06:05, Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote:

The E10k was only a 64-core machine on a tight backplane compared to
other large systems.  It didn't have any of the pressing needs that
Sequent and SGI did with multi-drawer interconnects to drive
excellence in NUMA.

When I started work at Cambridge in 2002 our central supercomputer was being replaced with a cluster of Sun Fire E15K machines with a fancy interconnect - it topped out at position 199 on the top500 list https://www.top500.org/list/2003/06/?page=2 with a 300 core configuration. It looks like they never managed to get the whole thing working as a single cluster since the other two thirds of the installation had positions 200 and 201! (The Nov. 2002 top500 list has it in 6 x 144 core shards.) Here’s a news item about it: https://www.cnet.com/news/sun-expands-supercomputer-effort/

True.  There is also at least one unencumbered strategy such as epoch
based reclamation which was known about around that time [2]

[2] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-579.pdf

The big benchmarks in this lovely thesis were run on one of the E15K supercomputer boxes :-)

Tony.
-- 
f.anthony.n.finch  <dot@dotat.at>  http://dotat.at