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Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data cent
by l1k 10y ago
Let's say you're a penetration tester, you're on-site trying to break into a network, have no Internet connectivity (e.g. because you're in a shielded data center or don't want to raise suspicion) and need to crack some passwords. 5x Skylake CPU + 5x Polaris GPU would be a sufficiently beefy platform for Hashcat, and it would fit into your backpack.
Or let's say you want to quickly set up a Hadoop cluster to crunch some data.
Five machines is certainly small as HPC clusters go, and in reality you'll probably have to cap this to four machines because you need one port to attach to a power socket if you need the cluster for more than 2-3 hours. Nevertheless the 4x 40 GBit/s Thunderbolt ports offer some really interesting possibilities, and I'm not aware of any other portable machine that has this right now.
- skynetv2 10y agoCan you run network stack at 40 Gbps on those ports?
- l1k 10y agoYes, but as stated in the article only on macOS or Linux on non-Macs. Not with Linux on Macs unfortunately. Someone needs to scrutinize the Intel-developed code for non-Macs, figure out how to port it to Andreas Noever's driver, and fill in the missing parts by reversing the macOS driver. Also, the Alpine Ridge controllers are attached with PCIe 3.0 4x lanes, that's 31.504 GBit/s, so you can't exhaust the available bandwidth fully.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoThere's 4 40Gbit/s ports, but their total bandwidth is not 160Gbit/s. IIRC, the ports on the right side of the machine have less total bandwidth because of how they're connected, for example.
- l1k 10y agoThat is correct. The Thunderbolt controller has two DisplayPort sink ports which are wired to the GPU, in addition to the PCIe 3.0 4x interface which goes to a root port in the CPU. So to actually max out the 40 Gbit/s, you need to drive external displays and also max out the PCIe 3.0 4x interface. Which is another way to say that 8 Gbit/s are reserved for DisplayPort.