On Nov 23, 2013, at 8:32 PM, Lawrence Stewart wrote: > Here are my impressions from the exhibits, in no particular order. > > Interesting technology > > Carbon Nanotube Computer > > In the Emerging Technologies area, there was a Stanford graduate student with > a MIPs compatible microprocessor made out of carbon nanotube transistors. He > said this was feasible because other than the nanotubes, it used standard > semiconductor processes. > > Adapteva > > Thomas Sohmers of REX Computing was in the Emerging Technologies area with a > working Adapteva Ephiphany board. > > Hybrid Memory Cube > > Last year, Micron was talking about their Hybrid Memory Cubes, stacked DRAM > dice on top of a controller exporting high speed SERDES links instead of DDRx > style interfaces. The things have 120 GB/s bandwidth to a single cube. This > year they seem to be real. PicoComputing had a PCI express module with four > big Altera FPGAs tied to the four channels of an HMC. They are still pretty > low density, 2 or 4 GB per HMC, but that will change. Hynix, Samsung, > Xilinx, Altera, and ARM are in the consortium. > > Kalray > > These guys are brilliant or crazy. Only time will tell. They have a 256 > core chip, with 16 clusters of 16 cores each. They have floating point. > There is on-chip interconnect. Each cluster has 2 MB of RAM but all the > clusters are distributed memory rather than shared. There are two DDR3 > controllers. > > This is sort of like a 256 core version of the 36-core Tilera, but without > shared memory. > > Brown Dwarf > > nCore has built a machine. Each node is 4 ARM15 cores and 24 C66x DSP. Up > to 144 nodes per rack, connected by serial RapidIO. 3.7 TB RAM. 69 SP TFlops > or 18 DP TFlops. Linux, OpenMPI, OpenMP. > > DEEP and Extoll > > The European Commission is working on a technology demonstrator. The > interesting part is the "Booster Node" which has two Xeon Phi "Dense Form > Factor" modules connected by Extoll NIC/Switch chips. I had not known about > the DFF modules, which Eurotech assembled using water cooling. The other new > thing, to me at least, was Extoll. These guys have a combined NIC/6 port > switch, and the NIC can pretend to be a PCIe root complex. That means you > can send I/O commands from some master node somewhere and boot the Xeon Phi > nodes remotely without having a local host node. > > I think Extoll is interesting because some of the ex-SiCortex guys tried to > start a company to do the same thing in late 2009 but we couldn't get > funding. And here it is! > > Mont-Blanc > > This is another European project, with low-power ARM+GPU nodes based on the > Samsung Exynos 5 SOC. It has two ARM A15 and a Mali-T604 GPU. Gigabit > Ethernet. > > Nallatech > > Nallatech is ostensibly an FPGA accelerator company, but they had a strange > brick thing on their table. It was about 4 inches square and two inches > thick, made of 32 thin slices in two ranks, with water cooling. Each slice > contained an Altera Arria FPGA and 8 GB DRAM. All these modules were wired > up to several thousand pins coming out the bottom of the module. It was made > for a special customer. So if you want processor-in-memory, and you have > money, I guess you can get it now. > > Moonshot > > This isn't new this year, but I hadn't seen one in person. This is the HP 4U > (5U?) box with 45ish cartridge slots. New this year are ARM and FPGA > cartridges along with the Atoms. Storage cartridges are coming. The HP guy > didn't really want to talk to me with my "Quanta" badge :) > > Water Cooling > > There was a lot of water cooling equipment on the floor. I liked the Staubli > booth for sheer mechanical pron. They make the drip-free connectors. > > Infiniband > > OK. I just haven't been paying attention I think. SGI is using IB in their > ICEx machines, connected in hypercubes. Hypercubes seemed like a good idea > in 1991, with the Thinking Machines, but now? > The problem is that you get log-base-2(nodes) max hopcounts, with half that > as the average. Fat Tree gives you 2*log-base-switch-degree(nodes) which > probably comes out around the same for 1000 nodes, but with simpler wiring. > Routing only works by dimension order routing, which doesn't need the virtual > channels that IB doesn't let you use anyway. > > Convey > > I know they've been at the show for several years, but this is the first time > I stopped in to talk, because I am working on FPGAs now. Their specialty > seems to be tight coupling of PCIe-space FPGAs with application programs by > direct memory mapping. This lets you hand off rather small work items to the > hardware, without having to deal with the OS kernel. Right now this requires > a custom kernel, but they say next summer it will work with standard kernels > plus modules. > > Other > > I like the 16 street Mall free busses. Maybe not all-free downtown like > Portland, but nice. > A pollster gave me a $5 Starbucks card for telling her how awful I thought > the Intel booth was. Score! > I thought the Swiss and the Saudis had pretty good coffee. (I didn't try the > coffee at SI though!) > The lego turing machine was nice. > The Mythbusters exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science was good. > I hope it comes to Boston. > I did not get an LSU scarf, which I really want. Ah well. > > -L > _______________________________________________ > 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
The academic behind Extoll is Prof. Dr. Brunning of Mannehim. I've know him and the Extoll project for years (started out with Hypertransport). I haven't seen the latest incarnations, but if what they are building is interesting to you, I can vouch for how easy he is to work with. doug Douglas O'Flaherty dougla...@gmail.com www.linkedin.com/in/douglasoflaherty/ 617-699-1486 _______________________________________________ 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
