[Beowulf] China Wrests Supercomputer Title From U.S.

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:55:32PM -0500, Alan Louis Scheinine wrote:

> With regard to networks, a near-future fork in the road between Beowulf
> clusters versus supercomputers may be the intelligence concerning global
> memory added to the network interface chip for upcoming models of supercomputers.

Yawn. First we had the attack of the killer micros. Now we have the
attack of the commodity interconnects. Do these special interconnects
with fancy global memory justify their cost vs. InfiniBand + HPC
tweaks? Do you really think you're going to program these machines
with something other than MPI?

Make your bets, wait, see if you win.

-- greg

ps. I am pleased to see that the new EXTOLL interconnect has a
non-RDMA short message system.

pps. Blekko launches November 1. Check out the /hpc slashtag.