Lessons Learned Porting SGI Based Simulations to a Linux Cluster
Terry Burress · 2002
Performance advances in microprocessor and graphics cards utilized by personal and single board computers have greatly increased their performance and thus their viability in a wide range of simulation environments. Given the favorable performance to cost ratio of the systems that are now available it has become apparent that a closer investigation of their applicability to various simulation uses be made. The growing maturity of the Linux operating system, its wider acceptance, and it’s roots in UNIX provide a basis for simulation development similar to SGI’s IRIX OS and makes comparisons more meaningful and less problematic than when faced with two completely disparate Operating Systems (e.g. Windows vs. LINUX). Performance alone is only half the story. Other factors such as the cost of software development, software and hardware maintainability and reliability, compatibility with vendors and other simulations, and the cost and ability to either develop training courses or provide training for new personnel must also be accounted for. Switching from one environment to another also incurs its own costs the most obvious being the cost of recoding or porting legacy code. Other associated costs that are often overlooked include the time spent retraining programmers, system administrators, and maintenance personnel to use the new environment. Even the cost of redesigning or moving interfaces and obtaining new versions of vendor supplied software packages are all factors that play an important part in the final decision. Many of these concerns are hard to analyze without the actual experience of working with the system in question.