[Beowulf] ever heard of ScaleMP?

[laytonjb at charter.net]

---- Joe Landman <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote: 
> Mark Hahn wrote:
> > there's a company, ScaleMP, which seems to be selling some kind of kit 
> > which enables to fairly large shared-memory x86_64 systems.
> > their website is nearly useless (http://www.scalemp.com/), but a little
> > more info can be had from SGI, which apparently uses ScaleMP for their
> > f1200 product (rebadged Ciara?).
> > 
> > they claim to support up to 32 sockets, 512GB memory.  "Versatile SMP".
> 
> The signage at SC07 claimed up to 1 TB ram.  Works with Intel and AMD.
> 
> > SGI seems to aim it purely at structural/cfd/crash sims - mainly using 
> > Abaqus and related tools.
> 
> Yup.  Big single memory/system image machines.
> 
> > as far as I can tell, the 32s configuration is 4x 8-socket boxes,
> > each with 7x 1 Gb links to their peers.  seems to claim that it runs 
> > unmodified rh/fc/suse systems.  marketing docs claim that the secret
> > sauce is bios firmware, and mention that "at least 10%" of the memory
> 
> Yup.  This is about right.
> 
> > is "reserved" for system cache.  I'm not sure how the bios is involved,
> > but it sounds like a pretty generic network-shared-memory system,
> > which would be OK for uncontended pages, but would thrash once procs
> > wait for ~80 us to reference a remote page...
> 
> They really want you to use a fast network connection ... think IB or 
> similar.

Flextronics was showing a small cluster where they had 4 boxes connected
by IB and within each box they had 4 systems connected by IB. They were
running ScaleMP on it. They had a graph of running Stream on top of the
system. They were plotting bandwidth vs. number of cores and it was fairly
linear (I didn't get a close look at it).

Jeff