My one of friend said that his server load average sometime goes above 500-1000, for me it is strange value because I never saw load average more than 10. I asked him give me some snapshot of top and memory usages, he gave following details:

TOP USAGES

top - 06:06:03 up 117 days, 23:02,  2 users,  load average: 147.37, 44.57, 15.95
Tasks: 116 total,   2 running, 113 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
Cpu(s): 16.6%us,  6.9%sy,  0.0%ni,  9.2%id, 66.5%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.8%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8161648k total,  7779528k used,   382120k free,     3296k buffers
Swap:  5242872k total,  1293072k used,  3949800k free,   168660k cached

Free

$ free -gt
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:             7          6          1          0          0          4
-/+ buffers/cache:          1          5
Swap:            4          0          4
Total:          12          6          6

Total cpu

$ nproc 
8

my question is it possible load average more than 100 on 8 core,12 GB mem Server? because I read many tutorial,article on load average, it said that thumb rule is "number of cores = max load"

according to thumb rule here is max load average 16 then how his server running with 147.37 load server? he said that it is least value (147.37) some time goes more than 500.