[Beowulf] Teraflop chip hints at the future

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Hi Eugen,

Can you explain the OS issue to us?

Thanks,
Vincent

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Eugen Leitl" <eugen at leitl.org>
To: <beowulf at beowulf.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2007 9:21 AM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Teraflop chip hints at the future


> On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 11:06:12PM -0800, Greg Lindahl wrote:
>
>> Yes, but there are several companies about to produce lower-cost
>> optical and active copper cables for IB. Since "4 wire" ethernet is
>> pretty similar to IB, presumably they'll see a price drop, too.
>
> Inter-die and inter-wafer level optical interconnects need not
> to be standartized, but just link up (over short distances, using
> fab-side connected high-precision tiny waveguide geometries) the
> on-silicon mesh fabric, running its custom protocol. What would be
> interesting in how this thing would deal with routing around defective 
> dies
> wafer-scale, either by remapping, or realtime with the mesh
> signalling protocol.
>
>> We were showing several of these technologies working at SC last
>> November.
>>
>> Also note that 4 gig FC is the same data rate as DDR IB.
>>
>> Now what the final costs will be, who knows?
>
> The problem with this chip (I've been expecting something very like
> this in about 1996, and in fact designed a paper CPU which is very much
> like this, only much wider, stack-based and leaner-core) is that's pure 
> vaporware.
> It would also need radically stripped-down kernels, which basically rules 
> out Linux
> (but there are reasonably lean things like L4 & Co available, which
> could run Linux as a wrapper on some fatter nodes).
>
> -- 
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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