[Beowulf] Network considerations for new generation cheap beowulfcluster

[Peter St. John]

Mostly I was thinking of TMC (famous for the animation in Jurassic Park),
1982-1994, from MIT, mostly acquired by Sun; so something from CalTech maybe
predating that, or competing with it, would be very interesting. I'll look,
thanks.
My only artifacts are DOS 3.2 and SVr4 manuals :-)
Peter


On 5/23/07, Jim Lux <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> At 10:52 AM 5/23/2007, Peter St. John wrote:
>
> But oh and Jim if you recall any papers about this I could read that would
> be "Jim" Dandy.
>
>
> I was working off memory, and the iPSC/1 and iPSC/2 manuals I have in my
> office as a historical artifact.
>
> I seem to recall that if you google hypercube and intel, you'll turn up
> some of the papers that were written early on.  The guys who started with
> the hypercube interconnect were at CalTech, as I recall, and spun off to
> form a supercomputer company embodying that, which Intel also adopted.
>
> Peter
>
>
> On 5/23/07, *Jim Lux* <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov > wrote:
>  At 09:19 AM 5/22/2007, Peter St. John wrote:
>
> A hypercube ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube) also gets you exponential space;
> the max hops is the dimension (3 for a 3-dimensional cube) and the number of
> nodes is exp(base 2) of the dimension (8 vertices on a cube). To do a
> tesseract (4-cube), which looks like two cubes nested, you'd need 4 ports
> per node, 16 nodes, 32 cables, max hop 4. I've poked around and don't see a
> great 4 ports per node solution; I like the suggestion of putting a router
> on a motherboard.
>
>
> Mind you, this is what Intel started with on their iPSC/1 and iPSC/2
> computers.  The early ones had multiple NICs in the nodes, then, later, they
> had a 8 port (I think) router in each node.
>
> It's not clear that this saves anything over a simpler architecture (e.g.
> external switch with lots of ports in a crossbar) unless you can do circuit
> switched routing (so you don't have a one packet delay in the switch) AND
> your algorithm can take advantage of it. I spent quite some time in the late
> 80s trying to figure out clever ways to take advantage of a hypercube
> topology for a modeling application..  I'm sure there are algorithms which
> are a natural fit, but the ones I was using weren't.
>
>
> James Lux, P.E.
> Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
> Flight Communications Systems Section
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
> 4800 Oak Grove Drive
> Pasadena CA 91109
> tel: (818)354-2075
> fax: (818)393-6875
>
> James Lux, P.E.
> Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
> Flight Communications Systems Section
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
> 4800 Oak Grove Drive
> Pasadena CA 91109
> tel: (818)354-2075
> fax: (818)393-6875
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20070523/e090d3a7/attachment.html>