[Beowulf] Network considerations for new generation cheap beowulfcluster

[Peter St. John]

This led me to SUNMOS (OS for parallel processing, Sandia's alternative for
the aforementioned intel PSC descendants)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUNMOS. Sandia's page looks like real progress
for inertial containment sustainable thermonuclear fusion, which really
wouuld be super duper cool, fuel your zeppelin with seawater, but I can't
find latter-day references to SUNMOS. Anybody know what became of it?
Thanks,
Peter


On 5/23/07, Jim Lux <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
>
> At 02:20 PM 5/23/2007, Larry Stewart wrote:
> >Peter St. John wrote:
> >>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
> >>
> >>
> >The problem with hypercubes is that the number of NICs per node
> >grows with the machine size.   Want to double your machine size?
> >Then add a NIC to every node you already have.  The number of nics,
> >or links, or cables, grows O(NlogN) for N nodes.  You get a machine
> >diameter which is log N, which is nice, but there are ways to do
> >that with a fixed number of NICs per node such as fat trees or the
> >Kautz/deBruijn family.
>
>
> Which is why Intel went to the "8 port switch in each node" sort of
> architecture with the iPSC/2.  The iPSC/1 got icky with having to
> keep adding ethernet cards into each node.  The iPSC/2 went to a
> packaging with each node on a single card, with two flavors of nodes,
> depending on whether it had a numeric/vector coprocessor or not.  You
> could put 128 nodes in a single rack, as I recall.
>
> (iPSC => intel Personal Super Computer)
>
>
> >TMC had, among other luminaries, Richard Feynman to help work out
> >the routing software.
> >
> >-Larry
>
> 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
>
>
>
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