________________________________________ From: beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org [beowulf-boun...@beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Ellis H. Wilson III [el...@runnersroll.com] Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 06:56 To: beowulf@beowulf.org Subject: Re: [Beowulf] thunderbolt?
On 02/25/11 08:05, Jonathan Dursi wrote: > Not really - best I've seen so far is ars > > http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/thunderbolt-smokes-usb-firewire-with-10gbps-throughput.ars >From the page: "That 10Gbps is much faster than most current I/O technologies. With two devices pushing data at the maximum rate, you could back up a full Blu-ray movie in 30 seconds, or sync 64GB of music to a portable device in about a minute." I love completely meaningless comparisons like this, which assume the medium your pushing or pulling your data to or from is capable of respectively reading or writing at that rate. For instance, where is this massive Blu-ray movie going to? >>> not to mention that Digital Rights Management means you're unlikely to be >>> allowed to "back-up" that copyrighted Blu-Ray video. (at least they're not talking about "transferring a Library of Congress" or stacks of encyclopedias) > interest. Consumer grade stuff suddenly coming with something that looks a > bit like > Inifiniband, (that you could also also easily open a console up over?) does > seem like > it'd be useful. The question is, I guess, if it can be switched/routed > easily. I guess I'm lost on why this would be really useful, especially from a beowulfery perspective. It's not like any sane Beowulfer would pay a premium for Macs just to have this interconnect when they could just get some old IB hardware. >> optical interconnects are nice. If high rate optical becomes a "consumer >> product" that's hewing to the original beowulf concept of leveraging cheap >> commodity hardware to build a supercomputer. Yes, I know that cluster >> computing has fallen from the true path of Beowulf, but as our namesake hero >> says, that was the mead talking. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
