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<DIV>All,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Not a expert, but I know a thing or two. The triblade is two CB2 blades</DIV>
<DIV>which each hold each two PowerXCell processors in a cc-NUMA arrangement.</DIV>
<DIV>They sandwch a LS21 blade that is connected to each through a 16x PCIe to HT</DIV>
<DIV>bridge. These three are uni-body constructed. The CB2s resemble the QS22 blade </DIV>
<DIV>that goes into the IBM BladCenter H chassis. They are vertical full-height</DIV>
<DIV>blades which fit 14 to an enclosure. The RoadRunner triblade is at least double-wide</DIV>
<DIV>and maybe more. Do not know the measurements. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>The photo confuses me though, because am pretty sure these are vertically racked.</DIV>
<DIV>Another thing to note is that programming the triblade is tri-binary ... x86, Power, </DIV>
<DIV>and SPE. MPI processes are doled out to the Opteron blade. The PowerXCells</DIV>
<DIV>are programmed beneath MPI as SIMD accelrators. The systems processing</DIV>
<DIV>power is largely resident in the PowerXCell (~200 peak Gflops per CB2), the</DIV>
<DIV>Opteron only accounts for about 44 teraflops of the total peak performance with is</DIV>
<DIV>in the vicinity of 1400 teraflops. Linpack runs at about 85% efficient on the system</DIV>
<DIV>and is running on the SPE only I am pretty sure. Running Linpack it generates 650</DIV>
<DIV>Mflops per watt making it pretty Green I guess ... which is what you would expect</DIV>
<DIV>from a DLP engine. As I recall Blue Gene is about 350 Mflops per watt. But the</DIV>
<DIV>650 number maybe does not count the LS21 power consumption. Anyway ...</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Hope that was useful ... now, can someone tell about the IEEE-754-ness of its eDP</DIV>
<DIV>units?</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>rbw<BR>-- <BR><BR>"Making predictions is hard, especially about the future." <BR><BR>Niels Bohr <BR><BR>-- <BR><BR>Richard Walsh <BR>Thrashing River Consulting-- <BR>5605 Alameda St. <BR>Shoreview, MN 55126 <BR><BR>Phone #: 612-382-4620</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">-------------- Original message -------------- <BR>From: "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john@gmail.com> <BR>
<DIV>Bernard,</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I'm looking forward to hearing from our resident experts, but meanwhile: <A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner</A> 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. </DIV>
<DIV>Wow,imagine a Beowulf of those (jk :-)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Peter (designing a Beowulf of abaci to fit his current budget)<BR><BR></DIV>
<DIV class=gmail_quote>On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Bernard Li <<A href="mailto:bernard@vanhpc.org">bernard@vanhpc.org</A>> wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Hi all:<BR><BR>I am sure most people have seen the following picture for Roadrunner<BR>circulating the Net:<BR><BR><A href="http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/09/fastest.computer.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch" target=_blank>http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/09/fastest.computer.ap/index.html?iref=newssearch</A><BR><BR>However, they don't look likes blades to me, more like 2U IBM x series<BR>servers. Perhaps those are the I/O nodes?<BR><BR>Cheers,<BR><BR>Bernard<BR>_______________________________________________<BR>Beowulf mailing list, <A href="mailto:Beowulf@beowulf.org">Beowulf@beowulf.org</A><BR>To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit <A href="http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf" target=_blank>http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf</A><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></body></html>