IEEE 1394

[Eray Ozkural]

On Thursday 05 December 2002 05:43 pm, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Dec 2002, Eray Ozkural wrote:
> > A while ago I had asked whether there were any existing clusters using
> > firewire IIRC. I had also found a similar query on this list, asked some
> > time before me, but I don't have the link right now.
>
> Have you seen
> 	http://www.ultraviolet.org/mail-archives/beowulf.2002/2977.html
> ?
>

This has a very different purpose from my design, I don't think it's much 
related.

> > I had even developed a design, unfortunately no professors had shown
> > interest in it at Bilkent. There are interface cards containing 3
> > firewire ports with
>
> It is most interesting to use with motherboards with onboard IEEE 1394.
>

For different purposes, maybe. What my design needs is n firewire ii ports for 
a hypercube of nth degree. I don't think there is any motherboard that gives 
you that.

> > aforementioned bandwidth/latency characteristics which makes them
> > excellent point-to-point connection devices. With a suitably high
> > performance kernel
>
> I've found another bit of info after posting to the list, which however
> looks proprietary. They claim "Asynchronous packet round trip, real-time
> thread to real-time thread and back is 110 microseconds worst case."
>
> http://www.fsmlabs.com/about/news_item.htm?record_id=48

[snip]

This is interesting since OS support is ultimately needed :)

>
> > router, this would make the construction of high performance
> > static-network distributed memory machines an ordinary feat.
> >
> > Each node would have 2 of those interface cards, totaling to 6 firewire
> > ports. 64 nodes can be connected in hybercube topology resulting in a
> > high performance supercomputer.
> >
> > If anybody wants me to come and help build it, just send me a job offer
> > :)
>
> There are solutions like http://www.disi.unige.it/project/gamma/mpigamma/
>

I'm aware of these messaging protocol projects. I investigated in the 
performance and the gains did not seem to be wildly different from stock 
2.4.x so I opted for that kernel.

Again, this isn't very related to the static architecture I am mainly 
interested in.

In my design there is no need for routers. We probably can't get decent 
CT-routing but even then it should have a blazing performance at an 
incredibly cheap price. Better than any gigabit ethernet network can offer. 
We had talked about gigabit ethernet performance many months ago and no 
implementations seemed to approach theoretical limits even in point-to-point 
connections.

The cards I'm talking about are products such as:

http://www.expansys.com/product.asp?code=BF-520

This one's got cards that go for $10-$20, pretty cheap...

http://store.yahoo.com/akidacomputer/ieee1adcar.html

Thanks,

-- 
Eray Ozkural <eozk at bicom-inc.com>
Software Engineer, BICOM Inc.
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B  EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C