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Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD

Posted by Hemos on from the opening-up-the-big-guns dept.

vincecate writes "Traditionally the key chips that have allowed companies to scale multiprocessors to large numbers have been proprietary. Some examples are the Cray SeaStar, SGI NUMAlink, HP sx1000, and the IBM X3/Hurricane. This proprietary paradigm is about to change to a more open one. Two companies have developed key chips for building large Opteron multiprocessors, and they will be commercial off-the-shelf parts. PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster. The other company is Newisys, which will soon release the Horus chip. This chip will make it possible to build 32 socket (64-core) shared memory Opteron systems."

3 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Big Iron? Uhhh... by kevin_conaway · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ehh, maybe. Normally "Big Iron" is associated with IBM but according to Wikipedia, the submitter is correct in using the term.

  2. Re:Links by Wesley+Felter · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, Horus is developed by Newisys, but the people who initiated it have moved on from Newisys to AMD.

  3. Re:Big Iron? Uhhh... by bloosqr · · Score: 4, Informative
    Whats your definition of Big Iron?

    There is a Cray XT3 that runs at 15 Teraflops at Sandia and made out of 2ghz opterons and is currently the 10th fastest computer in the world. There is a similar machine over at Oak Ridge National Labs that runs at 14 Teraflops and is the 11th fastest computer in the world.

    In fact, those lowly AMD kids seem to also have their chips on the fastest machine at the Pittsburgh supercomputing center (ranked 33rd fastest computer in the world) and the US Army Research Laboratory (ranked 39th fastest) . The latter was actually being built by IBM for ARL, you know those guys who coined the term "big iron".