Michael HF Wilkinson
Oh yes, there are man work loads for which this does well. All of them are clustered work loads.
Can I ask you a question? Why is that all mature, enterprise computer vendors with Big Iron, such as Enterprise Unix AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Mainframes, etc - why do they only have 32cpus or 64 cpus? Why are there no larger servers? Can you explain that? No? You can not explain that? Is it because them OSes scale bad?
On the other hand, there are lots of systems with 1024 cpus or more, for instance Blue Gene - but they are all CLUSTERS. That supercomputer called "Blue Gene" is basically a large cluster.
There are no Big Iron or heavy Unix servers with more than 64 cpus for a reason - those are not clusters. As soon as you go above 64 cpus, most probably it is a cluster. Otherwise IBM would have released a Unix server with 1024 cpus long time ago. But guess what? IBM had recently to rewrite AIX for it to be able to handle 256 threads. The mature Enterprise AIX did not scale. If those mature Enterprise Unix can not handle more than 32/64 cpus, do you really think that a toy OS such as Linux scales above 32 cpus? Or 64 cpus?
Ted Tso, Linux hacker and creator of ext4, wrote last year that Linux hackers consider 32 cores as exotic hardware, and as such, most probably Linux does not scale to 32 cores.
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2010/11/01/i-have-the-money-shot-for-my-lca-presentation/
"...Ext4 was always designed for the “common case Linux workloads/hardware”, and for a long time, 48 cores/CPU’s and large RAID arrays were in the category of “exotic, expensive hardware”, and indeed, for much of the ext2/3 development time, most of the ext2/3 developers didn’t even have access to such hardware. One of the main reasons why I am working on scalability to 32-64 nodes is because such 32 cores/socket will become available Real Soon Now..."