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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.
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.
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.
It's the same as the regular Opteron (otherwise stuff would break).
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".
My experience suggests that Suns compilers beat out GCC on single processor machines and more so on 8 and 16 processor systems.
I didn't realise that the compiler was involved in optimising code for multiple processors. I thought it was the programmer that had to do that. I must have been misinformed.
The benifit of Sun's mature sparc compilers might let you squeeze more performance out of a sparc box.
So are you comparing the Sun compiler and GCC on Sparc or Opteron because you don't make that clear? One would expect the Sun compiler to do best on Sparc since nobody else has ever been that interested in it.
If on the other hand, you are claiming that Sun have suddenly produced the best compiler for AMD's Opteron then I would like to see some more evidence.
For this context, 32 is plenty large. Large is relative. If you ask me how many grains of rice I ate last night, 100 would be a small number. If you ask the average slashdotter how many women he's dated, 1 is a huge number.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
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
If you ask the average slashdotter how many women he's dated, 1 is a huge number.
And the date was probably huge too.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Are those women real? /me ducks
Or integer
Help! help!, the termites are eating my DRAM!!!
The special thing about InfiniPath is that the adapter is not a PCI-(e|X) card but rather connects directly to the HyperTransport interface on the cpu (requiring a special MB with a "HTX" connector), giving slighlty lower latency than a normal IB adapter.
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.
I have personally dated 14+32i women, and trust me... it can get pretty complex.
heheheheheheheheheh... math humor... heheheh heheheh heheheh
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
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!!!
So I'm a big curious what is so vastly superior? Are you using Intel compiled codecs on AMD machines when you did your testing? Did you even do any testing? I'll admit I had some trouble getting things running smoothly with the Opteron box but the end results speak for themselves; especially when you move over to the 64bit world with 64bit capture drivers the Opteron blows away anything Intel has put out to date. Of course Intel 64bit support is slow as all hell right now so I'm sure that will change in the near future.
While you may have been burnt by AMD I will stick with them for the time being until Intel shows some signs of turning around their product offerings. I'm still curious how a processor has gone bad though. In my experience once you get back the first 90 days its smooth sailing regardless of manufacturer. Only reason I can think a chip would die later in life would be from a PSU failure or some sort of disruption. I've seen that happen, never just seen a cpu die though. Always some other component causing it.Of course this is getting off track from the article. The Opteron is very well suited for these large machines so I'll be curious how they perform in real environments like Oracle and DB2 setups. Opterons bandwidth improve the more processors you throw at it so it'll be intriguing to see the results.
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.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
I was curious too, perhaps the AMD optimized apps were better optimized that the Intel ones? Beyond that its also the fact that these Xeons could only do 32bit while the Opterons were running happily in 64bit. The biggest pain there was finding capture card drivers that worked and were natively 64bit. Viewcast makes that difficult, thankfully the Linux drivers worked.
I also might add that the test was a Dell PowerEdge 1750 vs an IBM eServer 325 and later the 326 with dual core which was even nicer. So Dell might just make slow servers while IBM makes em fast. I know I'm fairly impressed with the IBMs over the Dells. Many situations the Dells were choking and I replaced them with the IBMs and all was then smooth. Our webserver was a prime example. 72 million hits in a month the Xeon servers were maxing out. Replaced them with Opteron based IBMs and 186 million hits later they are barely breaking a sweat. 35% cpu with 32bit Windows Server 2003. I'm curious how the 64bit version will effect it since we're expecting 250-300 million hits in January. Going to be a good test.In any case, the Opterons have proved themselves around here. I had to fight for the first one and now all the owner of the company wants to hear is that there is an Opteron in the server he is buying. The systems are rock solid stable and even faster than I expected.
Another thought I had about the reason the servers performance might be different. The Dells had 3 10k rpm ultra 320 scsi drives in a raid 5 configuration while the IBM just has two SATA 150 drives in raid 1. So perhaps the raid configuration was slowing down the write times.Granted, not an ideal benchmark but its still pretty impressive the amount of power I can shove into a 1U server using the Opteron.