[Beowulf] Has anyone actually seen/used a cell system?

[Andrew Shewmaker]

On 10/2/06, Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm at xmission.com> wrote:

> I agree that generally libraries are a much more practical thing to implement.
>
> I don't know which category sequoia falls into I haven't read the paper,
> the only way it sounds interesting to this conversation is that it has
> some mildly interesting benchmark numbers associated with it.
>
> At the moment I'm a lot more interested in packets per second and bandwidth
> per second for future architectures then flops per seconds.  Cpu architects
> understand how to push the flops per second of general purpose processors
> quite high and are unlikely to develop amnesia when they have competition
> who is just as able as they are.   Where the current challenge comes from
> is how do you keep the bandwidth and I/O rates to the outside world growing
> at an exponential rate.  Maybe big SMPs on a chip will help with this if they can
> isolate most of the traffic inside them selves but I doubt it.

See Table 3 and Figure 11 on pages 9 and 10, respectively.  Table 3 reports
bandwidth for memory bound benchmarks, and Figure 11 graphs time waiting
on memory, overhead (barrier sync + runtime logic), and leaf task execution
time.

For memory bound SAXPY and SGEMV they report 18-22.1 GB/s out of a
theoretical 25.6 GB/s for the XDR memory.

They don't list the bandwidth numbers for the cluster, though they do show
the performance delta between pre-distributed and without pre-distibution.

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Shewmaker