As I wrote before some vendor promissed me a 16-core machine.... and indeed we received it. Now I have my 'toy' placed in the basement. Besides of some trouble putting a modified version of RHEL 4.5 on it, it works fine. At this moment I've installed RHEL 4.6 and it works fine. 
But to test the 16-cores I decide to compile a brand new kernel:
[root@cool-system]$ mkdir -p /tmp/kernel-test; cd /tmp/kernel-test/
[root@cool-system]$ tar -xjvf ~/downloads/linux-2.6.24.tar.bz2
[root@cool-system]$ cd linux-2.6.24
[root@cool-system]$ make mrproper
[root@cool-system]$ cp /boot/config-2.6.9-67.ELlargesmp ./.config
[root@cool-system]$ echo y | make oldconfig
HOSTCC scripts/basic/fixdep
HOSTCC scripts/basic/docproc
HOSTCC scripts/kconfig/conf.o
[..snip..]
#
# configuration written to .config
#
[root@cool-system]$ time make -j 32 bzImage
scripts/kconfig/conf -s arch/x86/Kconfig
CHK include/linux/version.h
UPD include/linux/version.h
[..snip..]
Setup is 11352 bytes (padded to 11776 bytes).
System is 1835 kB
Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready (#1)
real 0m40.887s
user 5m15.688s
sys 2m1.029s
[root@cool-system]$ _
During the compile, all the 16-cores are working hard 
