LinuxCon Europe + CloudOpen Europe

Linux in High performance computing has a mixed record. For a number of use cases the Linux environment can be made to work well. However, the need to provide bare metal performance often leads to compromises which causes a variety of approaches to be taken to avoid the operating system in performance critical paths. This talk gives an overview over the ways that Linux is used in the HPC industry, traces the performance problems that a variety of vendors have run into and gives a broad outline of the solutions that exists. The intend is to facilitate a discussion about the boundaries of Linux performance and explore ways that these boundaries can be stretched.

Time permitting we will talk about computational accellerators and their integration with Linux (I am especially interested in new Xeon Phi processor from Intel as well as GPUs and FPGAs).