> At 10:52 AM 5/23/2007, Peter St. John wrote: >>But oh and Jim if you recall any papers about this I could read that >>would be "Jim" Dandy. > > I was working off memory, and the iPSC/1 and iPSC/2 manuals I have in > my office as a historical artifact. > > I seem to recall that if you google hypercube and intel, you'll turn > up some of the papers that were written early on. The guys who > started with the hypercube interconnect were at CalTech, as I recall, > and spun off to form a supercomputer company embodying that, which > Intel also adopted.
nCUBE was a commercial hypercube machine. The first version used software routing, so if a CPU crashed, so did the whole machine. Version 2 had HW routing and after a hefty investment by Larry Ellison. It was destined to become a parallel database machine only it took a long time to get the Oracle working. As a result nCUBE sold into the HPC market against TMC for a while. I used to have an 8 processor board that plugged into a Sun 386i. The last I read they were making video on-demand servers. -- Doug > >>Peter >> >> >>On 5/23/07, Jim Lux >><<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>At 09:19 AM 5/22/2007, Peter St. John wrote: >>>A hypercube ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube) also gets you >>>exponential space; the max hops is the dimension (3 for a >>>3-dimensional cube) and the number of nodes is exp(base 2) of the >>>dimension (8 vertices on a cube). To do a tesseract (4-cube), which >>>looks like two cubes nested, you'd need 4 ports per node, 16 nodes, >>>32 cables, max hop 4. I've poked around and don't see a great 4 >>>ports per node solution; I like the suggestion of putting a router >>>on a motherboard. >> >>Mind you, this is what Intel started with on their iPSC/1 and iPSC/2 >>computers. The early ones had multiple NICs in the nodes, then, >>later, they had a 8 port (I think) router in each node. >> >>It's not clear that this saves anything over a simpler architecture >>(e.g. external switch with lots of ports in a crossbar) unless you >>can do circuit switched routing (so you don't have a one packet >>delay in the switch) AND your algorithm can take advantage of it. I >>spent quite some time in the late 80s trying to figure out clever >>ways to take advantage of a hypercube topology for a modeling >>application.. I'm sure there are algorithms which are a natural >>fit, but the ones I was using weren't. >> >> >>James Lux, P.E. >>Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group >>Flight Communications Systems Section >>Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213 >>4800 Oak Grove Drive >>Pasadena CA 91109 >>tel: (818)354-2075 >>fax: (818)393-6875 >> > > James Lux, P.E. > Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group > Flight Communications Systems Section > Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213 > 4800 Oak Grove Drive > Pasadena CA 91109 > tel: (818)354-2075 > fax: (818)393-6875 > > !DSPAM:46549197244853022792082! > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > > !DSPAM:46549197244853022792082! > -- Doug _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
