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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 :-)
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.... 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.
... 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.
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".
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,
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.
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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