I'm interested in theoretical limits, perhaps with examples of systems having huge numbers of CPU's.
Linux – How many cores can Linux kernel handle
kernellinux
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Well. How's that for fried RAM? Guess that was the culprit, after all.
I'm pleased to report that, after removing the defective stick, everything is going quite smoothly.
What I would recommend is that you don't stick to any IDE's per say. Let your code stay as flat files in the filesystem, and use independent tools (Emacs, the GCC toolchain, Ctags, etc) you have to for implementing the operations you have to implement. That will keep your codebase IDE-independant and free of clutter that surrounds it (like .project files, etc).
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At least 2048 in practice. As a concrete example, SGI sells its UV system, which can use 256 sockets (2,048 cores) and 16TB of shared memory, all running under a single kernel. I know that there are at least a few systems that have been sold in this configuration.
According to SGI: