• From Gaming To The Enterprise Data Centre

    From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=@ldo@nz.invalid to comp.misc on Wed Dec 24 20:36:07 2025
    From Newsgroup: comp.misc

    This article <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-deploys-the-steam-decks-linux-scheduler-across-its-data-centers-valves-low-latency-scheduler-perfect-for-managing-metas-workloads-at-massive-data-centers>
    is an interesting example of the synergy you get from an OS that is as
    widely deployed as Linux is. It is to be found in such widely
    disparate areas as handheld gaming and megacorp data centres like the
    ones run by Facebook.

    What on Earth would the two have in common, you may ask? Well, it
    turns out that a scheduling algorithm created by Valve to improve
    gaming response on its Steam Deck handheld is also useful for
    improving response times in those Facebook data centres.

    Of course, the Facebook engineers had to wrestle with the problems of
    scaling up the code to handle massive numbers of CPU cores. How did
    this impact on the original code developed for the Steam Deck?

    The engineers also addressed the obvious concern: does optimizing
    a scheduler for Meta's servers risk harming its original gaming
    use case? So far, they say, the changes are either neutral or
    beneficial for the Steam Deck, and features that don't apply can
    simply be disabled with kernel flags. Still, they admitted that
    the experiment is ongoing.

    Truly a remarkable experiment in scalability.
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