On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 6:21 AM, Matt Hurd <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm associated with a somewhat stealthy start-up. Only teaser product > with some details out so far is a type of packet replicator. > > Designed 24 port ones, but settled on 16 and 48 port 1RU designs as > this seemed to reflect the users needs better. > > This was not designed for HPC but for low-latency trading as it beats > a switch in terms of speed. Primarily focused on low-latency > distribution of market data to multiple users as the port to port > latency is in the range of 5-7 nanoseconds as it is pretty passive > device with optical foo at the core. No rocket science here, just > convenient opto-electrical foo. > > One user has suggested using them for their cluster but, as they are > secretive about what they do, I don't understand their use case. They > suggested interest in bigger port counts and mentioned >1000 ports. > > Hmmm, we could build such a thing at about 8-9 ns latency but I don't > quite get the point just being used to embarrassingly parallel stuff > myself. Would have thought this opticast thing doesn't replace an > existing switch framework and would just be an additional cost rather > than helping too much. If it has a use, may we should build one with > a lot of ports though 1024 ports seems a bit too big. > > Any ideas on the list about use of low latency broadcast for specific > applications in HPC? Are there codes that would benefit? > > Regards, > > Matt.
Maybe they're doing a Monte Carlo forecast based on real-time market data; broadcasting the data to 1000+ processes where each process is using a different random seed to generate independent points in phase-space. Of course they would then have to send the updated phase-space somewhere in order to update their likelihoods and issue a reaction. I suppose if communication was the primary bottleneck, doubling of the performance would be an upper limit. -Kevin > _________________ > www.zeptonics.com > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > -- Kevin Van Workum, PhD Sabalcore Computing Inc. Run your code on 500 processors. Sign up for a free trial account. www.sabalcore.com 877-492-8027 ext. 11 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
