[Beowulf] thunderbolt?

[Ellis H. Wilson III]

On 02/25/11 08:05, Jonathan Dursi wrote:
> 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

>From the page:
"That 10Gbps is much faster than most current I/O technologies. With two
devices pushing data at the maximum rate, you could back up a full
Blu-ray movie in 30 seconds, or sync 64GB of music to a portable device
in about a minute."

I love completely meaningless comparisons like this, which assume the
medium your pushing or pulling your data to or from is capable of
respectively reading or writing at that rate.  For instance, where is
this massive Blu-ray movie going to?  The hard drive on the laptop?
Unless one has a magic raid array in your laptop or is willing to burn
out your $1000 ssd drive at a particularly fast rate, writing greater
than 1.2GB per second is something like 10x faster than typical consumer
HDDs can work with.  Additionally, why isn't there any comparisons with
eSata?  This seems to me like another way to draw ignorant people in for
proprietary multimedia devices and keep them from moving off the Mac
platform (assuming PCs don't get this).  What a surprise.

> 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.

I guess I'm lost on why this would be really useful, especially from a
beowulfery perspective.  It's not like any sane Beowulfer would pay a
premium for Macs just to have this interconnect when they could just get
some old IB hardware.

Best,

ellis