What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 1985

Well, there is smp and there is SMP. It is a hard thing to do right. Just see how much struggling otherwise very competent people had with the transitions from Linux 2.4 to 2.6, and FreeBSD 4.7 to 5.x.

I would appreciate references.

The effects can be such stuff as limiting cache pollution from the large jobs etc. In any case, this counterintuitive effect should hold some lessons for scheduler design.

Even video editing farms out to 3-4 processors pretty well.

One process for audio, one for video and one for console, and the last for various OS tasks. A 2+"2" hyperthreading system really gives good interactive response.

I expect this is the way forward to more juice on the servers. The clock speed seem to have stalled, bot Moore's laws seem to more or less hold, at least the second one regarding computing power per watt.

I expect 4 to 16 way systems on a chip, and 16 to 256 way systems on rack mount systems to gain popularity over the next few years.

This means we should code small, independent tasks that can run in parallell.

-- mrr