Dear all: Thanks for all the responses. I was at the Roadrunner booth at SC07. They had a handout explaining the Roadrunner architecture which also has a picture of racks of blades (maybe not of Roadrunner, but blades nevertheless). If I remember correctly they even have the blades on display.
John's ComputerWorld link also has some pictures of the blades. So I guess I was just really trying to figure out what nodes those pictures are showing. Most likely the I/O nodes although there is also the off-chance that they are just random racks of servers ;-) Cheers, Bernard On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:05 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > All, > > Not a expert, but I know a thing or two. The triblade is two CB2 blades > which each hold each two PowerXCell processors in a cc-NUMA arrangement. > They sandwch a LS21 blade that is connected to each through a 16x PCIe to HT > bridge. These three are uni-body constructed. The CB2s resemble the QS22 > blade > that goes into the IBM BladCenter H chassis. They are vertical full-height > blades which fit 14 to an enclosure. The RoadRunner triblade is at least > double-wide > and maybe more. Do not know the measurements. > > The photo confuses me though, because am pretty sure these are vertically > racked. > Another thing to note is that programming the triblade is tri-binary ... > x86, Power, > and SPE. MPI processes are doled out to the Opteron blade. The PowerXCells > are programmed beneath MPI as SIMD accelrators. The systems processing > power is largely resident in the PowerXCell (~200 peak Gflops per CB2), the > Opteron only accounts for about 44 teraflops of the total peak performance > with is > in the vicinity of 1400 teraflops. Linpack runs at about 85% efficient on > the system > and is running on the SPE only I am pretty sure. Running Linpack it > generates 650 > Mflops per watt making it pretty Green I guess ... which is what you would > expect > from a DLP engine. As I recall Blue Gene is about 350 Mflops per watt. But > the > 650 number maybe does not count the LS21 power consumption. Anyway ... > > Hope that was useful ... now, can someone tell about the IEEE-754-ness of > its eDP > units? > > rbw > -- > > "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." > > Niels Bohr > > -- > > Richard Walsh > Thrashing River Consulting-- > 5605 Alameda St. > Shoreview, MN 55126 > > Phone #: 612-382-4620 > > > -------------- Original message -------------- > From: "Peter St. John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Bernard, > > I'm looking forward to hearing from our resident experts, but > meanwhile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner exlains the > architecture some. The buzzword is "triblade", which is 3 blades (with an > extension) employing two types of processors (AMD Opteron and IBM Cell) in > a hybrid subsystem. I have no idea what a single Triblade looks like. The > overallmachine is then composed of zillions of triblades. > Wow,imagine a Beowulf of those (jk :-) > > Peter (designing a Beowulf of abaci to fit his current budget) > > On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Bernard Li <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Hi all: >> >> I am sure most people have seen the following picture for Roadrunner >> circulating the Net: >> >> >> http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/09/fastest.computer.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch >> >> However, they don't look likes blades to me, more like 2U IBM x series >> servers. Perhaps those are the I/O nodes? >> >> Cheers, >> >> Bernard >> _______________________________________________ >> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org >> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit >> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: "Peter St. John" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "Bernard Li" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:16:19 +0000 > Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Roadrunner picture > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
