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."

Comments

it's about time

[qwertphobia]

It's about time! That z990 under my desk just isn't fast enough :-)

Expect to see....

[8127972]

.... an Alienware game system with this chipset by the end of the week.

Imagine a... nah, too easy.

[meringuoid]

Cheap shots about Gentoo and Doom 3 aside, this is cool to see. I imagine it warms the heart of a lot of us old AMD fanboys. Plus, with a bit of luck the extra volume will bring down the prices of the Athlon 64s we stick in our gaming boxen. Right?... Right?

... k, maybe not. Can't afford one anyway :-(

Re:Imagine a... nah, too easy.

[Mercano]

I imagine it warms the heart of a lot of us old AMD fanboys.

Plus anything else in the room it sits in. Great solution to the heating oil crunch! These things ain't P4s, but 32 CPUs is 32CPUs.

Clusters vs. single servers

[Wesley Felter]

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.

Re:Big Iron? Uhhh...

[kevin_conaway]

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

Re:Big Iron? Uhhh...

[BJZQ8]

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.

god damnit

[Douglas Simmons]

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.

Re:Links

[Wesley Felter]

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

Re:Big Iron? Uhhh...

[bloosqr]

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".

Re:Is 32

[nganju]

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.

Great AMD is quit is doing fine.

[JollyFinn]

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.