The cluster used a mix of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 1 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. However, the workload was what’s often known as "embarrassingly parallel," m

The cluster used a mix of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 1 Gigabit Ethernet interconnects. However, the workload was what’s often known as "embarrassingly parallel," meaning that the calculations are independent of each other. As such, the speed of the interconnect didn’t really matter. Ah, if only this were true for everything. It'd make everyone's lives a lot easier. :-) Unfortunately there are a lot of applications out there where inter-node communication is incredibly important: computational fluid dynamics, in all its varied forms, is a good example of a latency-bound application. This covers weather forecasting, aerodynamics, dynamic mechanical modeling, and so on. What I find interesting is that to get to 51,000 cores, they had to use AWS datacenters all over the world. I'd love to know what kind of resources are actually available in any given datacenter. It will vary at any given time, but it would be useful to know how many cores are "close" to each other in a networking sense, for applications were latency matters.