[Beowulf] thunderbolt?

[Jonathan Dursi]

On 2011-02-25, at 1:08AM, Mark Hahn wrote:

> anyone have non-vapid info about thunderbolt?

Not really - best I've seen so far is ars

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/thunderbolt-smokes-usb-firewire-with-10gbps-throughput.ars

but that's not great either.   It seems like it plugs directly into the PCIe bus (_and_ the 
displayport stuff?) and requires no CPU intervention to transfer data - those two things,
plus the eventual upgrade to optics + 100Gb/s, does seem like it would it would be of 
interest.   Consumer grade stuff suddenly coming with something that  looks a bit like
Inifiniband, (that you could also also easily open a console up over?) does  seem like
it'd be useful.   The question is, I guess, if it can be switched/routed easily.

Anyway, several people around here are planning on upgrading their MacBooks, so
I guess we'll get a chance to play with it soon enough.

   - Jonathan

-- 
Jonathan Dursi <ljdursi at scinet.utoronto.ca>      SciNet, Compute/Calcul Canada