Red Hat updates premium Linux distro
Published: 13 Mar 2006 10:50 GMT
Red Hat has released an update to its premium Linux product that supports 64-processor x86 servers.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the leading commercial version of the open source operating system. Red Hat released Update 3 last Tuesday, taking Linux to multiprocessor heights previously reserved for the Unix operating system after which Linux is modelled.
New processor technology coming to market means that supporting 64 processors no longer necessarily means a customer has a multimillion-dollar fridge-size server. One change is the arrival of multicore chips, while another is multithreading, in which a single processor core can run more than one instruction sequence at the same time.
Red Hat's multiprocessor support is for "logical" processors; a server with 64 logical processors could have 64 single-core processors; 16 dual-core, dual-thread Xeon processors as in the IBM x460 server; or 16 quad-core processors when those models become available in 2007.
RHEL already supported 64-processor Itanium servers. The update extends that level of support to machines with IBM's Power processor. In addition, Update 3 includes a "technology preview" of support for as many as 256 Itanium processors and 128 Power processors.
Another change with the new version is support for Intel's Montecito processor, the first dual-core Itanium model. It's expected to ship from Intel in the second quarter and arrive in HP servers in the third quarter.
Red Hat added a technology preview version of the OpenIB InfiniBand software, which today is used chiefly to link many machines into a high-performance technical computing cluster.
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