As the boundaries keep getting fuzzier between so-called ‘systems management’ and ‘network management’ (especially in Grid computing discussions) – it’s become clear to me that Linux is the breeding ground where the networking innovation is happening.Recently we explored what it was that had made Linux the preferred OS for Grid computing in general, and we heard from Adam Fineberg at Levanta that: “Some of the key aspects of an operating system that you really need take advantage of in a Grid computing environment are the networking and file systems. The networking side is very important because of the large number of nodes, the need to quickly / easily add more nodes, exchange information between the nodes with low latency, as well as access shared storage systems and devices. Linux does very good ‘zero copy’ networking, meaning that once the data reaches the network stack, it doesn’t have to be copied again all the way through the rest of the operating system. That really keeps the networking efficient in Linux systems.”It’s funny how quickly after you learn something new, you start bumping into it all the time. Because shortly after getting that insight from Adam about the specific networking performance of Linux (that’s so well-suited for Grid), I spoke with Franco Travostino at Nortel, whose virtual mash-ups on the Grid are running on Xen hypervisors, and are being proved out in a Linux environment. “We created a demo by which we took some Xen-based virtual machines that were crunching some particular, computation-intensive tasks … and we moved them to Amsterdam,” said Travostino. “And then from Amsterdam, we moved them to Chicago, and them from Chicago back to Seattle. And in spite of the tens of thousands of miles, the impact on the applications was less than one second. So that’s pretty mind-boggling, to think about having a fully featured Linux environment running lots of applications, and teleporting all that across the world with such minimal disruption. DRAC is the “network middleware” that makes this long-haul migration possible at the network level. Specifically, DRAC puts in place a short-lived deterministic network service, on demand. As well, it preserves the sessions with any remote client.”And then I learned from Scott Koranda at Univa that more networking innovation on Linux may be forthcoming in Grid.“One interesting development that comes to mind is the recent release of Fedora Core 5, which actually includes different TCP/IP stacks that an administrator can use to dynamically control how the machine is responding and working on a TCP network,” said Koranda. “Now, I don’t think we’ll see those capabilities being exploited quickly in a lot of communities, but I think the Grid community will be one of those where we’ll see that functionality exploited sooner rather than later.” And then — of course — the other historical anecdote that’s worth pointing out in the context is that Linux’s networking strength was really proved out by guys like Donald Becker (current CTO of Penguin Computing), a pioneer in Linux clustering.“In the early days, the challenge was as simple as getting the machines to talk to each other – so my background on the Linux side was contributing to the networking side of the Linux kernel,” said Becker. “Getting the machines to communicate meant figuring out a lot of the high-throughput, low-latency communication requirements for clusters.” Technology Industry