On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:35:34AM -0400, atchley tds.net wrote: > I had forgotten about Fulcrum. I was under the impression that Fulcrum made > the chips and sold them to switch vendors.
They did. Now at Intel, they've showed off a new architecture (based on shared memory, an unusual implementation choice for a big switch) and indicated that among other things, they're going to build a lower port-count switch to go on Open Compute racks. > With InfiniBand semantics (lossless and strong ordering), you can't define > multiple paths A given IB flow has to have a single path, but you can send multiple flows between node A and node B via multiple paths in a standard- conforming fashion if you have multiple LIDs. Also, QLogic has a clever multipath feature in their FC switches which could be invisibly done in an IB switch -- I stopped "needing to know" early enough that I don't know if that feature made it into the IB switch silicon that Intel now owns. If I wanted to be grossly overgeneral, SDN is taking all the awesome things that IB can do on a local network and applying it to ethernet for both WAN and LANs. It's pretty cool, and maybe I should have listened 6 years ago when Feldy said I would looooove what Google had in mind for me to do! For Ethernet, where allegedly the best you can do is spanning-tree but vendor silicon provided the hidden ability to do routing the same way as IB or Myrinet, this is a revolution. And for WANs, it provides all the features that various network scheduling systems were trying to provide. -- greg _______________________________________________ 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
