Evaluating the effect of replacing CNK with Linux on the compute-nodes of Blue Gene/L

The Blue Gene machines in production today run a small single-user, single-process kernel (CNK) having a limited functionality. Motivated by the desire to provide applications with a much richer operating environment, we evaluate the effect of replacing CNK with a standard Linux kernel on the compute nodes of Blue Gene/L. We show that with a relatively small amount of effort we were able to improve benchmark performance under Linux up to a level that is comparable to CNK. Copyright 2008 ACM.