very high bandwidth, low latency manner?

[Daniel Kidger]

Craig Tierney wrote:

>I talked to a guy at SC2002 from Quadrics and he said
>that list pricing on a Quadrics network was about $3500
>per node when you are in the 100s of nodes and up.  
>The price includes the cards, cables, switches,
>etc.  This doesn't include any sort of discount that you
>might get.  Myrinet is about $2000 for an equivelent 
>network at list price.   Dolphin/SCI falls around $2245 list 
>per node (if the system is > 144 nodes and you have to get
>the 3d card).


I guess I should jump in here to give the Quadrics perspective...

I have spent 2 weeks in the USA doing some benchmarking on clusters of
McKinleys under Linux and I get home find lots of e-mails talking about the
Quadrics stuff, but no e-mails were from people either at Quadrics or from a
customer site.

I have only been with Quadrics for six months or so, and (fortunately) it is
not me but the marketing people that decide the pricing scheme.


Quadrics have sold most systems to date as part of Compaq's Alphaserver SC
range. However we also do sell via other vendors, particularly as linux
clusters. Our model though is not to sell direct to end-users but via
systems integrators. 

£3500 per node is maybe about right - pricing would always include all
cards, cables, switches and software.  
The cost is admittedly high, after all as well as having the fastest
line-speed, the Quadrics interconnect sends all data as virtual addresses
(the NIC has its own MMU and TLB). That way any process can read and write
the memory of any other node without any CPU overhead.
The cost also tries to cover the high R+D; with volume sales the price may
end up significantly  lower.


Any discussion on costing would be better taken up with our marketing types
- but I am happy to share my knowledge on performance issues. :-)



Yours,
Daniel.

--------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Dan Kidger, Quadrics Ltd.      daniel.kidger at quadrics.com
One Bridewell St., Bristol, BS1 2AA, UK         0117 915 5505
----------------------- www.quadrics.com --------------------