[Beowulf] Roadrunner picture

Egan Ford egan at sense.net
Fri Jun 13 08:43:31 PDT 2008


Perhaps this will help:

http://www.lanl.gov/roadrunner/

And:

http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/hpc/roadrunner/pdfs/Koch%20-%20Roadrunner%20Overvie
w/RR%20Seminar%20-%20System%20Overview.pdf

Pages 20 - 29

IANS, the triblade is really a quadblade, blade 1 is the Opteron Blade,
blade 2 is a bridge, blades 3 and 4 are the Cell blades.

Lots of other good stuff here:

http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/hpc/roadrunner/rrseminars.shtml

> -----Original Message-----
> From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org 
> [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Bernard Li
> Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 4:33 PM
> To: richard.walsh at comcast.net
> Cc: Beowulf Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Roadrunner picture
> 
> 
> Dear all:
> 
> Thanks for all the responses.  I was at the Roadrunner booth 
> at SC07. They had a handout explaining the Roadrunner 
> architecture which also has a picture of racks of blades 
> (maybe not of Roadrunner, but blades nevertheless).  If I 
> remember correctly they even have the blades on display.
> 
> John's ComputerWorld link also has some pictures of the blades.
> 
> So I guess I was just really trying to figure out what nodes 
> those pictures are showing.  Most likely the I/O nodes 
> although there is also the off-chance that they are just 
> random racks of servers ;-)
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bernard
> 
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:05 PM,  <richard.walsh at comcast.net> wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > Not a expert, but I know a thing or two. The triblade is two CB2 
> > blades which each hold each two PowerXCell processors in a cc-NUMA 
> > arrangement. They sandwch a LS21 blade that is connected to each 
> > through a 16x PCIe to HT bridge. These three are uni-body 
> constructed.  
> > The CB2s resemble the QS22 blade that goes into the IBM 
> BladCenter H 
> > chassis.  They are vertical full-height blades which fit 14 to an 
> > enclosure.  The RoadRunner triblade is at least double-wide
> > and maybe more.  Do not know the measurements.
> >
> > The photo confuses me though, because am pretty sure these are 
> > vertically racked. Another thing to note is that programming the 
> > triblade is tri-binary ... x86, Power,
> > and SPE.  MPI processes are doled out to the Opteron blade. 
>  The PowerXCells
> > are programmed beneath MPI as SIMD accelrators.  The 
> systems processing
> > power is largely resident in the PowerXCell (~200 peak 
> Gflops per CB2), the
> > Opteron only accounts for about 44 teraflops of the total 
> peak performance
> > with is
> > in the vicinity of 1400 teraflops.  Linpack runs at about 
> 85% efficient on
> > the system
> > and is running on the SPE only I am pretty sure.  Running Linpack it
> > generates 650
> > Mflops per watt making it pretty Green I guess ... which is 
> what you would
> > expect
> > from a DLP engine.  As I recall Blue Gene is about 350 
> Mflops per watt.  But
> > the
> > 650 number maybe does not count the LS21 power consumption. 
>  Anyway ...
> >
> > Hope that was useful ... now, can someone tell about the 
> IEEE-754-ness 
> > of its eDP units?
> >
> > rbw
> > --
> >
> > "Making predictions is hard, especially about the future."
> >
> > Niels Bohr
> >
> > --
> >
> > Richard Walsh
> > Thrashing River Consulting--
> > 5605 Alameda St.
> > Shoreview, MN 55126
> >
> > Phone #: 612-382-4620
> >
> >
> > -------------- Original message --------------
> > From: "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john at gmail.com>
> > Bernard,
> >
> > I'm  looking  forward to hearing from our  resident  experts, but
> > meanwhile:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner 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.
> > Wow,imagine a Beowulf of those  (jk :-)
> >
> > Peter (designing a Beowulf of abaci to fit his current budget)
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Bernard Li <bernard at vanhpc.org> 
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi all:
> >>
> >> I am sure most people have seen the following picture for 
> Roadrunner 
> >> circulating the Net:
> >>
> >>
> >> 
> http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/09/fastest.computer.ap/index.html?ire
> >> f=newssearch
> >>
> >> However, they don't look likes blades to me, more like 2U IBM x 
> >> series servers.  Perhaps those are the I/O nodes?
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> Bernard
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
> >> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit 
> >> http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
> >
> >
> >
> > ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> > From: "Peter St. John" <peter.st.john at gmail.com>
> > To: "Bernard Li" <bernard at vanhpc.org>
> > Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:16:19 +0000
> > Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Roadrunner picture 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
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> >
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> >
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