As NUMA technology works on both the hardware and software side, the operating system must be NUMA aware. Currently, the only available options are Windows Server 2003 Enterprise, Windows Server 2003 Data Center, and scattered Linux variants. Luckily, the upcoming variants of Windows XP 64-bit Edition and Windows Server 2003 64-bit Edition are both NUMA-aware. Once these operating systems are released, we should be able to see NUMA deployments on a much larger scale. It's also rumoured that Microsoft's upcoming Longhorn operating system will have NUMA support all the way down to the consumer level, but that has yet to be confirmed. We used the publically available version of Windows XP 64-bit Edition for our NUMA testing. While the operating system is still in a beta form, its NUMA implimentation appears to be fully functional.