Catamount (operating system)

[1] Catamount is a lightweight kernel that provides basic functionality and aims for efficiency.

The roots of Catamount go back to 1991 when SUNMOS was developed by Sandia National Laboratories and the University of New Mexico as a lightweight operating system.

[1] A case study by the IEEE assessed the performance of a particle transport code on AWE's Cray XT3 8,000-core supercomputer while running images of the Catamount and the Cray Linux Environment (CLE) operating systems.

The study's findings enabled researchers to minimise system downtime while exploring software upgrades.

The results show that benchmark tests run on less than 256 cores would suggest that the impact of upgrading the operating system to CLE was less than 10%.