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An Analysis of Linux Scalability to Many Cores, by a number of MIT researchers, is a refreshingly practical paper on what it takes to scale Linux and common applications like Exim, memcached, Apache, PostgreSQL, gmake, Psearchy, and MapReduce to run on 48 core systems. A very timely paper given moderately massive multicore systems are reportedly the near future of computing.
This paper must have taken a lot of work. They both tracked down bottlenecks in a number of applications and the Linux kernel and they also tried to fix them. Modestly speaking the authors said they made "modest" changes to the kernel and applications, but there's nothing modest about what they did. It's excellent work.
After the next bit, which is the abstract, there is a list of the problems they found and how they fixed them.
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