> For almost 20 years the best we've been able to do are things like Infiniband that are far slower than on-board DRAM The SGI shared-memory big iron machines

> For almost 20 years the best we've been able to do are things like Infiniband that are far slower than on-board DRAM The SGI shared-memory big iron machines (Origin & Altix) are more recent and can have memory-only nodes. The most recent NUMA Altix was launched in 2009, I'm not sure if the later machines managed to keep the Origin 2k era goal of having as much remote memory bandwidth as local. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMAlink http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMAlink