Catamount is an

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

for

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions ...

s. Catamount is a lightweight kernel that provides basic functionality and aims for efficiency. The roots of Catamount go back to 1991 when

SUNMOS SUNMOS (Sandia/UNM Operating System) is an operating system jointly developed by Sandia National Laboratories and the Computer Science Department at the University of New Mexico. The goal of the project, started in 1991, is to develop a highly porta ...

was developed by

Sandia National Laboratories Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), also known as Sandia, is one of three research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Headquartered in Kirtland Air Force Ba ...

and the

University of New Mexico The University of New Mexico (UNM; es, Universidad de Nuevo México) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded in 1889, it is the state's flagship academic institution and the largest by enrollment, with over 25,400 ...

as a lightweight operating system. The Cray XT3 uses Catamount on compute nodes and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

on server nodes.''An Evaluation of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Cray XT3'' by Sadaf R. Alam etal ''International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications'' February 2008 vol. 22 no. 1 52-80 A

case study A case study is an in-depth, detailed examination of a particular case (or cases) within a real-world context. For example, case studies in medicine may focus on an individual patient or ailment; case studies in business might cover a particular fi ...

by the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

assessed the performance of a particle transport code on

AWE Awe is an emotion comparable to wonder but less joyous. On Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions awe is modeled as a combination of surprise and fear. One dictionary definition is "an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., ...

's Cray XT3 8,000-core

while running images of the Catamount and the Cray Linux Environment (CLE) operating systems. This work demonstrated that by running a number of small benchmarks on a test machine it is possible to speculate as to the performance impact of upgrading from one operating system to another on the system as a whole. The study's findings allows researchers to minimise system

downtime The term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. The unavailability is the proportion of a time-span that a system is unavailable or offline. This is usually a result of the system failing to function because of an un ...

while exploring software-system

upgrades The fourth season of ''Stargate SG-1'', an American-Canadian television series, began airing on June 30, 2000 on Showtime. The fourth season concluded after 22 episodes on February 14, 2001 on British Sky One, which overtook Showtime in mid-season ...

. The results show that benchmark tests run on less than 256 cores would suggest that the impact of upgrading the operating system to CLE was less than 10%.

References

Supercomputer operating systems {{Operating-system-stub

See also

References