Hi Eugen,
Can you explain the OS issue to us?
Thanks,
Vincent
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eugen Leitl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <beowulf@beowulf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:21 AM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Teraflop chip hints at the future
On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 11:06:12PM -0800, Greg Lindahl wrote:
Yes, but there are several companies about to produce lower-cost
optical and active copper cables for IB. Since "4 wire" ethernet is
pretty similar to IB, presumably they'll see a price drop, too.
Inter-die and inter-wafer level optical interconnects need not
to be standartized, but just link up (over short distances, using
fab-side connected high-precision tiny waveguide geometries) the
on-silicon mesh fabric, running its custom protocol. What would be
interesting in how this thing would deal with routing around defective
dies
wafer-scale, either by remapping, or realtime with the mesh
signalling protocol.
We were showing several of these technologies working at SC last
November.
Also note that 4 gig FC is the same data rate as DDR IB.
Now what the final costs will be, who knows?
The problem with this chip (I've been expecting something very like
this in about 1996, and in fact designed a paper CPU which is very much
like this, only much wider, stack-based and leaner-core) is that's pure
vaporware.
It would also need radically stripped-down kernels, which basically rules
out Linux
(but there are reasonably lean things like L4 & Co available, which
could run Linux as a wrapper on some fatter nodes).
--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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