The SX-Linux Project: A Progress Report

Abstract

The increasing appeal of hybrid computer architectures built of components specialized for different purposes and types of programs motivated this project that is aimed at integrating the NEC SX architecture more easily with hardware running the Linux operating system. Users of the NEC SX vector computers should be presented a Linux-like environment that simplifies the usage and porting of code developed on Linux workstations, and allows the use of parallel filesystems like Lustre directly from applications running on the SX nodes. The project is a collaboration of HLRS and NEC EHPCTC Stuttgart and has started in the first half of the year 2008. This paper reports the progress after one year of work with a team of up to 6 people: a working open source toolchain with binutils and the C compiler of the GNU Compiler collection ported to the SX, a simple free C library usable for testing, progress on the GNU C++ compiler, an I/O forwarding infrastructure that allows SX programs to do I/O to files visible on Linux servers, and a running light weight kernel derived from Linux code, that is a sane basis for developing a high performance specialized compute node kernel for the NEC SX machines.