[Beowulf] Intro question

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2008, Joe Landman wrote:

> The MDGrape guys might have a thing or three to say.  They have been 
> demonstrating some pretty awesome performance for years.

True, but my impression was that they were focused on getting the most 
performance from one unit, while the DEShaw approach factored in a 
high degree of parallelization from the beginning.

I've heard the talk in Dresden earlier this year and I liked hearing 
about an idea that I've also had some time ago but not heard talking 
about on this list: interconnect hardware being able to DMA directly 
to/from CPU cache. I don't know how useful such a feature is for a 
general purpose interconnect (or MPI library) but it certainly fits 
well in the specialized frame of molecular dynamics (or rather, of how 
MD is implemented today).

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8850
E-mail: bogdan.costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de