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Not to rain on anyone's parade, but next to my desk is a machine about 10 times more powerful than what this paper describes. The main issues with the setup in
by alain94040 15y ago
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but next to my desk is a machine about 10 times more powerful than what this paper describes.
The main issues with the setup in the paper: latency between nodes. Gigabit Ethernet is just not good for latency. To nitpick some more, Virtex-4 is getting old.
- simcop2387 15y agoI definitely agree about GE being a bad choice, I suspect that something like HT would work better for this application. I wouldn't be concerned about Virtex-4 being old, being used as a proof of concept for this should at least give some indication of how the design of the whole thing scales and give some idea of the problems that will come about, latency being one of them.
- 0x12 15y agoThe pig dances, I'm sure that over time it will learn how to dance better.
- neopallium 15y agoGigabit Ethernet is mainly used as a control network. Each FPGA has 4 RocketIO links (2-3Gb/s) and they are directly connected in a 2-D torus of point-to-point links. The RocketIO network is used for nearest-neighbor communication patterns. For reduction operations such as global sums, they call back to the host CPUs for MPI reduction operations to be preformed over the GE network. Also one of the main goals was to build the supercomputer from commodity parts and "plug-in" FPGA cards, so they most likely had to go with FPGA cards there where available and maybe cheaper then the latest/greatest. The paper would have been more interesting if they had compared this machine to other types of supercomputers then just CPU clusters.
- kristianp 15y agos/cheaper then the/cheaper than the/g s/then just/than just/g