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Supercomputer To Use Optical Router
Izmunuti writes "From a NYTimes article: 'Highlighting a radical departure in the design of the fastest computers, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology plans to announce on Monday that it will use an optical router
designed by a Texas company as the heart of a
campus-wide supercomputer that will be woven together with optical fibers.'"
So how is this any different from using gigabit fiber instead of copper? Although for most large clusters gigabit is too slow when you need to move around a terabyte of data. Look into NUMA.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Someone figured out that you can pack more bandwidth and less latency into fiberoptics than copper?
More importantly they are actualy using an optical router to prevent what has become a botleneck in resent years. I.e. Data comming off a fiber pipe is converted to electrical signals before being routed to it's next destination where it's converted back to little bity laser beams.
This should be faster than your typical loadsharing super computer (SETI@home) but slower than the miranet using hardcore. With enogh nodes however there is no telling howfast this baby can get.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
When it comes down to it, the computers do the work. You can do useful supercomputing with almost no networking, you can't do useful supercomputing with blindingly fast networks and no computers.
(Somehow, the quote reminds me of people who think that managers and lawyers are the important part of a company, and engineers and customer service are a nuisance to be minimized.)
Anyway, we're about pushing the limits of copper, with 1000bT, and I'd imagine network speeds will only continue to climb with increased use of fiber. I can see, in 5 to 10 years, optical switches becoming more common in office environments as file sizes and network speeds continue increasing.
RTFA... " Each of the clusters is based on Intel microprocessors and runs the Linux operating system."
I'm not seeing how it's all that revolutionary. Am I wrong in saying it's essentially a Beowulf connected by an optic network?
A pure optical router using analog signals which are passed through a crystal and output at certain locations based purely on their wavelength(wich coresponds to the exact binary data of the full packet) and the path which the light beam is forced to take! HA! Ha HA! MWUAHAHAHAHAHAHAA!
>:D
What? It could happen...
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
guess what.. its *almost* faster than the speed of light. well, if it wasnt light of course :)
I think perhaps you're a bit confused, my friend. It _is_ digital in that it's sending information as numbers, it's just carrying those numbers on an analogue signal.
The medium isn't important in digital, it's the message. Whether I send you a sequence of 20,000,000 numbers via carrier pidgeon or blue/green modulated laser light isn't important (other than latency) - it's the fact that those 20,000,000 numbers got from A to B via some means other than picking them up and carrying them.
So, we are all digital now, and have no need to go back.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Also, their statement on the Chiaro Networks "OptIPuter" is here. Caltech is an entirely different animal.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Just as the article started to pique my interests, it was over. That sucks!
Yet another technology article written without any real information. I realize in writing you are supposed to write to the common reader, but sometimes it seems like they would be better off not writing about it at all if they didn't intend on clueing us in on any of the facts.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
The optiputer will initially consist of about 500 processors linked via the optical switching system that will permit parts of the computer to share information at the speed of light.
In other breaking news electromagnetic radiation (read: electricty) doesn't travel at the speed of light! Coming Soon to Fox: When Reporters Get Confused
At any rate that article was darn short on details, and the company's website wasn't any better. Anybody have any relevant data on exactly how fast this switching system is? I'm curious about their optical router at the heart of the system as well. It is my understanding that the slowest part of any fiber-based system is the router since the signals must be converted from light to electrical than back to light signals again. One would assume that such a design would be entirely too slow to be used as a bus. Of course, I may be entirely wrong...
Electrical signals travel at around 1/10 the speed of light.
Yay for free subscriptions.. here are some other sources for similar reportings that don't require evil subscriptions.
First: These optical signals are interpreted digitally.
Second: If you spread your devices over campus, you will not generally get "insane speeds". No signal can be sent faster than lightspeed. So if we are accessing a piece of information 1 km away, latency will be over 6.6 microsec...
Now, you can get a fast link in the sense of sending a lot of information per second, but this is not usually what you really need in a supercomputer.
"Somehow, the quote reminds me of people who think that managers and lawyers are the important part of a company, and engineers and customer service are a nuisance to be minimized."
You mean like Microsoft?
Or most ISPs?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
We're not going back any more than we already are. Ethernet is bits transmitted on a wire via varying voltage levels, which are fundamtally analog. Digital is always based on an analog medium, the only difference is that digital defines a few discrete levels for each chunk of information (eg. 2 for a logic line, 8 or more for POTS modems) rather than the nearly infinite values available for bare analog.
This would be a network of computers, not a supercomputer. The definition is becoming more lenient, so in a few years everyone on the internet will be a node in the world's largest (and only) supercomputer, and 80% of them will be redundantly running through Windows DLLs. Yay.
The idea of optical routing is that, even in typical gigabit or any optical based networking media, the bottleneck is the processors in the routers. This is because the light must be converted to electrical signals, and then routing decisions and switching are done on the processor of the router. After being processed, the signals are converted back to optical to be sent out the appropriate port.
Optical switching means that the light coming in on fiber from different devices is never converted to electrical to be routed. The actual light signals are switched from port to port. This was originally planned to be done with very small mirrors! (no joke!) which would aim incoming light to the corresponding outgoing port.
According to the whitepaper on Chiaro's website, they have found a way to avoid the mirrors (which have an obvious bottleneck themselves, as well as potential mechanical failure) and they are able to multiplex or switch the light based on applying an electrical field to some of the optical components which them changes the angle and therefore the destination of the light.
Most of the key people at Chiaro are people who jumped ship from Convex Computer after they were acquired by Hewlett-Packard back in the mid-90s. Convex's claim to fame was to have invented and productized the first mini-supercomputer hitting the sweet-spot between the biggest vax and the smallest cray and they were very successful for about a decade.
Larry Smarr, of UIUC's supercomputing center (aka the place where Mosaic was developed) has always been a big fan of the Convex crowd.
Another bit of trivia - Jeff Christenson, of PERL fame is a convex alum as well as Dave Taylor of Id Software fame and a whole host of other key people now scattered about the world.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
HAL will be born a few years late...
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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>"the communications lines will be the fastest part of the computer and the processors will become slower "peripherals."
Just imagine....
---
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...And it still gets Slashdotted...
The point is that a Californian organisation is using something "designed by a Texas company". Now that is "a radical departure"!
:)
Maybe I'm reading this wrong?
OLPC Australia
Corect me if I'm wrong but I always thought SGI was using light in it's interconnectors between machines? That's how they can achieve amazing throughput.
-- Leeeter than leet
I was told by a fiber-optic transceiver engineer that signals actually travel faster in copper coax than in fiber (in both it's less than c, the speed of light in a vacuum). So couldn't you get even better results by hardware-switching a coax signal? And how usefull is only being able to talk to 1 other node at a time? Sounds to me like these guys have reinvented the T-bar used to connect IMB System 370 channels together... (albeit with much better performance).
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Because the previous attempt to implement a campus wide supercomputer using an RFC 1149 based network caused the pigeons to burst into flames.
i am the cl-itit commander. no one rules the cl-itit like me. not this little fucker, not any of you little fuckers...
There is still some room to grow left in the semiconductor business....but not much. Now that chip makers are near the limit in the "how small can I shrink it race", the goal now is to fit more die on single silicon wafer. As the "need for speed becomes more critical I think optical computing breakthroughs will become more common place as soon as the semiconductor business and research community start to move away from silicon semiconductors. When the focus on optic technology becomes dominant silicon chips won't go away, but they won't be as high tech.
"You helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- 1976." --George W. Bush, to Queen Elizabeth, Wash
The experiment you reference does NOT show information travelling faster than light.. as is explained in the article.
The waveform appears to exit the apparatus before it enters, but this is not so under scrutiny... as the article says, the beginning of the wave enters the glass (long before the peak) and there is enough information there to re-create the original wave.
There are several phenomenon that appear at first to be superluminal, but they do not violate relativity, and are not actually moving anything faster than light, nor are they transmitting information.
He still drives a Porche with Convex as number plate.
Help fight continental drift.
The pure optical IP or ATM router is still years away. Optical computing isn't up to optical packet decode and route lookup. Optical buffering isn't ready, either, although you could potentially store packets temporarily in a fibre delay line.
While company calls it optical phased array, "array" only works with linearly increasing electric field, what turns it into just another case of diffraction, with "waveguides" being more like segments of diffracting material changing their properties each as a whole when electric field is applied (as opposed to pressure being applied in other devices). It would be more impressive if the device was purely optical -- if some material changed its properties based on the light applied to it, and bent another beam because of that change.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I mean, you pour a six pack on a computer, it just won't go as fast. OK, so you might need some work to beat the fault tolerance, but I'm sure you can find six parts that'll bring it down together.
with a wavelength dependant no linearity in the medium would do exactly that.
An FP inferometer consits of a pait of parallel mirrors, one half silver, the other full. The beam of light enters at an angle, and then the position of the output from the half silvered mirror is wavelength dependant. They are used in situations similar to a diffraction grating, but they can be made much more accuratly. (There are other criteria too, which I forget.)
This seperates very close fequencies. Imagine - instead of giving a machine an IP, give it a frequency.
Haveing a laser that is tunable in frequency is not too difficult - the simplest solution would be to use an Optical parametric oscilator. These split the laser into two different colours, and you just block the colour you don't want.
Then you hit Planck's constant.
Nevermind then..
Let's just set up a bunch of those dealies in a giant array which has all the functions of the world's fastest punchcard-based computer!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
This reeks of Smarr, the man who ran an NCSA that did virtually nothing except some flashy demos and Mosaic. Mosaic being a project that was actively discouraged by upper management until it became too successful, whereopon they took credit. Smarr is a master politician, but lacks an eye for people and projects that accomplish something, rather than just looking superficially cool.
Nothing can move faster than the speed of light in vacuum, to be more precise. It's entirely possible to have particles traveling faster than the speed of light in a medium. For charged particles, this causes a radiation field known as Cherenkov radiation, first observed in 1934. It's somewhat similar to the sonic boom observed when something moves faster than the speed of sound.
Andrew S Tanenbaum's book on Computer Networks points out a similar trend; that bandwidth is increasing faster than processor speed. In the future, it'll veyr likely be faster to transfer information about than to process it locally. And that means that distributed computing might become intrisic to most software.
The internet in itself might become a resource for idle CPUs. With a few billion or more individual systems networked up, playing that game of Quake 10 might rely on the processor time borrowed from others.
Actualy. Digital means just 1&0. :)
Not any old number
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I stand corrected.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?