On 08/13/14 01:10 AM, Joshua Mora wrote:
Certainly my assumption/interpretation has been "what is the availability of
the cheapest and largest SMP solution with full coherence in hardware that you
can build".
Notice I mention hardware based coherence since there are software based
solutions available as well.
If you need just plenty of cores at the highest core count density that you
can get with small memory footprint per OS_instance/core(for instance, for
consolidation/virtualization reasons), then you do not need coherence and a
much wider range of solutions are available that can use other
interconnects/fabrics.
Is consolidation/virtualization really applicable at all to HPC? I
thought virtualbox/vmware and all other friends don't allow direct
access to the x86 extensions. Disabling this, the overhead or any layer
on top I think would cause unacceptable levels of performance hit.
(Someone please correct me if I'm wrong) The closest thing I can think
which would play nice would be Solaris zones. (Which allow fine grained
control of resources, but don't hide/limit the hw level capability)
I'm curious to see what Doug had in mind..
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