[NCLUG] Anyone have Experience with an SGI Altix UV 10 machine

[Kevin Olson]

Greetings!

I have an opportunity to acquire an SGI Altix UV 10 machine. It is about 6
years old, so it is pushing the architecture back a bit. It has 4 x Xeon
x7550 CPUs,with 512GB of memory. My understanding is that the memory is
"globally shared", but it is a "deep hierarchy" so for performance reasons
one really wants to keep to a single CPU for most activities.

My questions are:
  * I would like to install CentOS 6.x or 7.x on it. Currently it has
SLES11 SP4 installed. Are there any barriers to such an installation? There
were notes on the web about RHEL being an available option for it years
ago, but I do not know if that was enabled due to proprietary drivers of
any sort.
  * Are there any tips on how to allow CentOS to perform best given the
memory architecture?

Does anyone here have experience with such a machine? Or advice on whether
the attempt is foolhardy?

Thank you.
Kevin