Linux - Symmetric Multiprocessing

Tim Jones gives a brief overview of SMP and discusses working with the Linux kernel:

Linux and symmetric multiprocessing

Tim Jones:

"As processor frequencies reach their limits, a popular way to increase performance is simply to add more processors. In the early days, this meant adding more processors to the motherboard or clustering multiple independent computers together. Today, chip-level multiprocessing provides more CPUs on a single chip, permitting even greater performance due to reduced memory latency.

You'll find SMP systems not only in servers, but also desktops, particularly with the introduction of virtualization. Like most cutting-edge technologies, Linux provides support for SMP. The kernel does its part to optimize the load across the available CPUs (from threads to virtualized operating systems). All that's left is to ensure that the application can be sufficiently multi-threaded to exploit the power in SMP."