[Beowulf] Roadrunner picture

[Bernard Li]

Dear all:

Thanks for all the responses.  I was at the Roadrunner booth at SC07.
They had a handout explaining the Roadrunner architecture which also
has a picture of racks of blades (maybe not of Roadrunner, but blades
nevertheless).  If I remember correctly they even have the blades on
display.

John's ComputerWorld link also has some pictures of the blades.

So I guess I was just really trying to figure out what nodes those
pictures are showing.  Most likely the I/O nodes although there is
also the off-chance that they are just random racks of servers ;-)

Cheers,

Bernard

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:05 PM,  <richard.walsh at comcast.net> wrote:
> All,
>
> Not a expert, but I know a thing or two. The triblade is two CB2 blades
> which each hold each two PowerXCell processors in a cc-NUMA arrangement.
> They sandwch a LS21 blade that is connected to each through a 16x PCIe to HT
> bridge. These three are uni-body constructed.  The CB2s resemble the QS22
> blade
> that goes into the IBM BladCenter H chassis.  They are vertical full-height
> blades which fit 14 to an enclosure.  The RoadRunner triblade is at least
> double-wide
> and maybe more.  Do not know the measurements.
>
> The photo confuses me though, because am pretty sure these are vertically
> racked.
> Another thing to note is that programming the triblade is tri-binary ...
> x86, Power,
> and SPE.  MPI processes are doled out to the Opteron blade.  The PowerXCells
> are programmed beneath MPI as SIMD accelrators.  The systems processing
> power is largely resident in the PowerXCell (~200 peak Gflops per CB2), the
> Opteron only accounts for about 44 teraflops of the total peak performance
> with is
> in the vicinity of 1400 teraflops.  Linpack runs at about 85% efficient on
> the system
> and is running on the SPE only I am pretty sure.  Running Linpack it
> generates 650
> Mflops per watt making it pretty Green I guess ... which is what you would
> expect
> from a DLP engine.  As I recall Blue Gene is about 350 Mflops per watt.  But
> the
> 650 number maybe does not count the LS21 power consumption.  Anyway ...
>
> Hope that was useful ... now, can someone tell about the IEEE-754-ness of
> its eDP
> units?
>
> rbw
> --
>
> "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future."
>
> Niels Bohr
>
> --
>
> Richard Walsh
> Thrashing River Consulting--
> 5605 Alameda St.
> Shoreview, MN 55126
>
> Phone #: 612-382-4620
>
>
> -------------- Original message --------------
> From: "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john at gmail.com>
> Bernard,
>
> I'm  looking  forward to hearing from our  resident  experts, but
> meanwhile:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner exlains the
> architecture some. The buzzword is "triblade",  which is 3 blades  (with an
> extension)  employing two types of processors (AMD Opteron and  IBM Cell) in
> a hybrid subsystem.  I have  no idea what a single Triblade looks like. The
> overallmachine is  then composed of zillions of triblades.
> Wow,imagine a Beowulf of those  (jk :-)
>
> Peter (designing a Beowulf of abaci to fit his current budget)
>
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Bernard Li <bernard at vanhpc.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi all:
>>
>> I am sure most people have seen the following picture for Roadrunner
>> circulating the Net:
>>
>>
>> http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/09/fastest.computer.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch
>>
>> However, they don't look likes blades to me, more like 2U IBM x series
>> servers.  Perhaps those are the I/O nodes?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Bernard
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>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john at gmail.com>
> To: "Bernard Li" <bernard at vanhpc.org>
> Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:16:19 +0000
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Roadrunner picture
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