IBM Adds Features to AIX 5L
Better Performance, Grid Tools
IBM Corp. said today it had added new capabilities to its flagship AIX 5L Unix operating system to improve system performance. In addition, IBM issued a Grid computing toolkit to help move grid applications to AIX.
The new version of AIX 5L includes relatively technical improvements that reduce limitations built in the operating system. Technical Large Page boosts the maximum size of a page in memory. AIX can now support the traditional 4KB page size or can use the new 16MB “large page.” The new page size allows the machine to move information more efficiently.
Other technical improvements include scheduling affinity, which assigns a task to a set of processors, and memory affinity allocates pages based on which processors are closest to their memory modules.
IBM says business users will find the most benefit from these improvements when running large-scale databases, which need to keep large amounts of data in memory. The improvements also improve performance for computationally intensive technical applications.
Technical computing is the traditional realm of AIX, and today’s grid computing announcement supports that heritage. IBM’s first pre-packaged toolkit for the Globus grid computing protocol arrived for AIX today. It is available for free download and contains middleware for running a grid project.
About the Author
Chris McConnell is Product and Technology Editor for Enterprise Systems.