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Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD
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."
It's about time! That z990 under my desk just isn't fast enough :-)
Never ask for directions from a two-headed tourist! -Big Bird
.... an Alienware game system with this chipset by the end of the week.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Give it another few months and I'm sure Sun will have some server with an obscene number of opterons in it, if thier current direction is any indication ....
-GenTimJS
... k, maybe not. Can't afford one anyway :-(
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why roll your own when you can get the pricing of mass produced processors and focus your value add on better software, interconnect and optimization? Scale it up and down. Bring on a practical desktop cluster for video rendering ang Foling @ Home!
SeaStar and InfiniPath (and don't forget the XD1) are great for building non-cache-coherent clusters, but those are mostly useful for running specially-written scientific applications.
Horus is used for building Opteron ccNUMA machines with one OS instance that can run any Linux or Windows apps. It's a very different solution for a different market.
Ehh, maybe. Normally "Big Iron" is associated with IBM but according to Wikipedia, the submitter is correct in using the term.
Why not? "Big Iron" doesn't mean ONE of anything anymore.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Just wanted to point out that the link to Newisys is just a blurb stating that AMD is releasing the Horus chip, and doesn't really have anything to do with Newisys, other than the fact that a couple of the people behind the AMD Horus release used to work there.
Oh, and the Horus link is a PDF whitepaper... please warn when a link points to a PDF.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I think this represents a fundamental shift in what "big iron" of the future will be. Instead of a few ultra-reliable, ultra-expensive processors, we will use masses of somewhat-reliable, cheap processors. The 64-processor clusters are just the beginning. Sony/IBM's Cell is a step in that direction; lots of little processors, rather than one big one. Big Iron is just what you make of it, after all, and ultra-reliability in practice doesn't have to mean an archaic architecture in design.
You kids, with your ultrasparc risc processing synchronous hypermultithreading vax/vms redbox pbx mumbo jumbo and your Ska music. For Christ's sake, cut the cotton-pickin' bullshit and tell me which stocks to buy and which to short. Oh and that AMD "capturing" the retail market tip the other day? Thanks for costing me six thousand dollars, my wallet was too thick and giving me a bad back. Christ.
For a minute I was excited I might get to pop an Opteron into my PDP.. that thing really lags when you try and load up Wolfenstein. Or "Adventure" for that matter.
really a 'large number'?
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
I think somebody (ie, you) is confusing what big iron *is* for what it *was*. Things have changed in the days of the Beowulf cluster.
My experience suggests that Suns compilers beat out GCC on single processor machines and more so on 8 and 16 processor systems.
The benifit of Sun's mature sparc compilers might let you squeeze more performance out of a sparc box. Although of course the opterons have a higher clock speed in the first place.
It's the same as the regular Opteron (otherwise stuff would break).
China has had that system running since June 2004: http://www.top500.org/sublist/System.php?id=7036
Which makes my wonder, how much of the post is really news?
Big Iron has already been available in 64 processor configurations for many years, the sun E10000 is quite old now, and i`m sure there were similar sized machines much earlier.
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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".
No. They. Haven't.
No-one seriously wants to run a bank on a Beowulf cluster.
And what about the Foundry BigIron series?
I think you're misreading the title. He ment that Big-Iron(mainframe companies) are opening to AMD. This will allow AMD to scale up their processors using the Big-Iron tech. Sounds good to me.
PathScale has released InfiniPath which can be used with an Infiniband switch to make a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a supercomputer cluster.
This is news? We've been using an Infiniband-connected Opteron cluster for almost a year now. I got bids from half a dozen companies willing to sell us one. This is old, established tech.
Operton is still proprietary, isn't it?
Nor do they want to spend 100x the cost of a Beowulf cluster on a single big iron machine that has less processing power. Which is why companies like those in the story are bridging the gap by speeding up the latency of multiprocessor computations. So you use commodity chips, get great performance, lower prices, and don't deal with clusters.
Despite your assertions, the days of classic big iron are over. DEC got bought and rebought years ago. SGI and Cray are both penny stocks, that's how well their markets are doing. IBM's essentially out of that market completely.
These days, "big iron" generally means a rack full of blades. The market for overpriced machines from the likes of Cray is dead. And putting periods at the end of every word in your sentence doesn't change that.
Huh? Since when does "big iron" have anything to do with the manufacturer of the CPUs used? Sorry, but your attempt to be cool by sneering at AMD's failing, kid - you're only making yourself look like a fool who doesn't know what he's talking about. :)
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
A 32-way SMP dual-core opteron box is a serious threat to Sun Enterprise boxes with 64 to 128 UltraSparc, even the hardware partitioning doesn't mean as much when you can just use two or more x86-64 boxes at probably less than half the price. For that matter, it also attacks HP's "superdome" Itanium2 servers and some of IBM's Power5 and Power6. The closed architectures and the proprietary Unix(tm) they run are in deep doo-doo
Proprietary is proprietary. AMD chips are no more "open" than any other vendor's chips.
Umm, I know there's this odd phenomenon where many people tend to label any processor that's made by either Intel or AMD "non-proprietary" and any processor made by another company "proprietary", but even still this article is a little silly. SPARC processors have been in use since the late '80s, most people consider SPARC-based machines "Big Iron", and the SPARC processor architecture is fully open -- anyone who wants to can make SPARC processors. SPARCproductDIRectory lists a bunch of companies who currently do. In fact, there are probably just as many (if not more) SPARC manufacturers as there are X86 manufacturers.
This just in: Mac users say 64 core Opteron server will be almost as fast as the new Mac G5.
Hate to break it to you ...
I've worked for Banks, Airlines too
The all had BIG iron in the server rooms
These people are not doing lots of hard calculations
They are moving large amounts of data...
Clock speed doesn't matter that much in these cases.
I/O bandwidth is king for these applications
The fact that these machines are ULTRA reliable
Is a really big deal for these companies.
You can't just reboot you're entire banking platform
to add disk or fix broken hardware.
Processing power just isn't the point in these cases
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
AMD and Intel have introduced multicore chips to the consumer market. It won't be too long now before there are millions of home computers with SMP class processing power. I suspect we'll start seeing games that take advantage of multiple processors by the end of next year. Whether they scale past 2 cores is an interesting question.
Listen up!
a) was I talking to you? a: NO!
b) did I say it was a manufacturer thing? a: NO!
c) Kid? Don't call me kid you fucking loser!
Unfortunately, opterons are not yet reliable (refering to your "ultra-reliable" bit). I don't know if it's just us, but 5% of the opterons that we ordered give the following... (machine names have been disguised to protect the innocent, my job, and homosexual whales)
... ...
[root@XXXXXXXXXXXXXX-oracle-1 root]# CPU 0: Machine Check Exception:
0000000000000004
Bank 4: f60d200159080
Message from syslogd@XXXXXXXXXX-oracle-1 at Thu Oct 13 16:38:41 2005
XXXXXXXXXX-oracle-1 kernel: CPU 0: Machine Check Exception: 0000000000000004
813 at 000000005dfee510
ernel panic:
Message from syslogd@XXXXXXXXXX-oracle-1 at Thu Oct 13 16:38:41 2005
XXXXXXXXXX-oracle-1 kernel: Bank 4: f60d200159080813 at 000000005dfee510
CPU context corrupt
This occurs with both the HP and ASA machines, with the exception that this can be generated on HPs by having mismatched "processor card" PCB versions.
Thank you for your time,
BBH
Go slashdot!!!!!!!
More to the point, supercomputers are not mainframes, which were (and still are, at least in most circles) the only systems that were traditionally associated with that term, and most of the folks who assert that mainframes are dead are not working for (and have never worked for) the companies who have traditionally used Big Iron in the first place.
Those of us who still work in the airline, banking, or insurance industries know that most of the current mainframe systems aren't going anywhere. They run on Big Iron for a reason.
Eventually they will be replaced, as everything is, but IMO their eventual replacements will be mainframes in everything but name -- ultra-secure, reliable, recoverable systems acting as large-scale corporate data servers.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
How is Opteron not proprietary? Only Intel and AMD can manufacture AMD64/EM64T chips. These chips (as with their x86 brethren) are among the most proprietary of chips, up there with Power 5. The only chip that's anywhere close to not being proprietary is the SPARC, which just about anyone can make (though only Sun and Fujitsu seem to).
But, it's not really designed for this.
And what makes you qualified to state this? Opterons were designed with EXACTLY this in mind, right off the drawing board - i'd dig up some old articles about it but I'm at work. Research Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA), supercomputing, and the Opteron's architecture as it related to those two. AMD knew what they were doing when they designed the Opteron - Intel has been completely out-engineered.
So where I can buy the AMD server with near full redundancy?
Or the server which can run highly debugged application written in mainframe assembler in 60's or 70's ?
Or atleast AMD computer with SINGLE memoryspace atleast 1TB in size?
And also how many decades of uptime is for the operating system which is used with the new AMD computer?
The horus is more or less getting close to midrange server in number of processor while it won't bring it to the reliability requirements of midrange server, to get that it would have to run its own memory controllers instead of cheap ass opteron controllers which lack for example hotswappable memory.
Sure you get speed, but after taking the speed there is eventually a crash.
The big iron is all about gettin continuing to function no matter what comes.
Only problems outside of box, like earthquake or something similar could bring it down.
Yeah. AMD is doing just fine...
Its eating the cheap ass market, not the big iron.
The price is cheap and its bought where the crash proof means better than windows which is like saying saying its unsinkable since it does better in open seas than normal rowboat used in lakes.
Lets put it this way. x86 is just used in low end boxes and in clusters of lowend boxes. And those things are not for everything. They can do much but not everything. They are cost effective when you compare only the purchase price. But not so cost effective when downtime costs a lot.
There is probably order of magnitude or TWO orders of magnitude of what joe slashdotter thinks big iron and what businesses have in big iron as in price range.
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Maybe you should ask Linus Torvalds and friends; they're the ones who have to worry about it.
If I were a betting man, I'd give you my trousers.
Stick Men
Hey, you lost your kanji .signature?
Research Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)
Ma-ya-hee, ma-ya-hoo...
No why -- just how the instruction mix turns out. One example is PostgreSQL. Where Opterons might be 15% in MySQL, MS-SQL, DB2 versus a Xeon at the same price range, it's 100%+ faster than a Xeon in PostgreSQL. One of the things noted was large context switching was a big penalty on Xeons so there's been an effort to reduce it.
Real World Tech has a great interview between David Kanter and two of the engineers working on Horus. If you're interested in actual information about how it works and what it does, its good reading.
BTW, Linus Torvalds posts to RWT :-D
Causation can cause correlation
Actually, this is an old idea. Anyone here remember Thinking Machines? All those pretty lights!
sorry...