[Beowulf] thunderbolt?

[Hearns, John]

> 
> 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.


Well, Beowulfery should be following off-the-shelf components.
Remember that Infiniband started life as a general interconnect, for
attaching devices outwith the chassis, in a converged network style. It
only found its niche in HPC as a 'by-product' when HPC types hunting for
the most blazingly fast interconnects latched onto it (pun intended).
Remember that Intel dropped Infiniband and there was a bit of a stooshie
in the HPC world at the time.
Thank goodness other manufacturers kept running with it.

As other people have said, even if this bus does not have a central
switch if you could (say) rack four boxes together and connect them in a
mesh,
and run RDMA over it you could achieve an single process space machine
for not much money.




stooshie - a fuss, a fracas




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