[Beowulf] Intel buys QLogic InfiniBand business

[Ellis H. Wilson III]

On 01/23/2012 07:40 PM, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>> On Jan 24, 2012, at 12:02 AM, Joshua mora acosta wrote:
>>> Nanosecond latency of QPI using 2 rings versus something that has a
>>> latency up to factor 1000 slower
>>> with the pci-e as the slowest delaying factor.
>>>
>>> Doing cache coherency over that forget it.
>>
>> Hear that Shai F?  Stop work on vSMP now, cause Vincent says it can't
>> work!!!
>>
>> More seriously, with this acquisition, I could see serious contention
>> for ScaleMP.  SoC type stuff, using IB between many nodes, in
>> smaller boxen.
>
> That would be some BlueGene type machine you speak about that intel
> would produce with a low power SoC.
>
> This where at this point the bluegene type machines simply can't
> compete with the tiny processors
> that get produced by the dozens of millions.

For...chess?  ;D

> "The tiny processors have won"
>      Linus Thorvalds

*Torvalds, and if Linux (or any well-supported kernel/OS for that 
matter) currently had data structures designed for extremely high 
parallelism on a single MoBo (i.e. 100s to 10,000s of cores) then I 
would agree with this statement.  As I currently see it, all we can 
really say is that someday, probably, perhaps even hopefully:

"The tiny processors will win."

That's after we work out all the nasty nuances involved with designing 
new data structures for OSes that can handle that number of cores, and 
probably design new applications that can use these new OS features. 
And no, GPU support in Linux doesn't count as this already having been 
done.  We just farm out very specific code to run on those things.  If 
somebody has an example of a full-blown, usable OS running on a GPU 
ALONE, I would stand (very interestingly) corrected.

> Intel has themselves a second law of Moore. You can google for it.

Thanks, for a moment there, I almost used AskJeeves.

> A good example of massproduced processors are gpu's.

Was waiting for the hook.  Inevitable really.  I think if we were 
discussing the efficacy and quality of resultant bread from various 
bread machines versus the numerous methods for making bread by hand 
somehow, someway, a GPU would make better bread.  Might be a wholesome 
cyber-loaf of artisan wheat, but nonetheless, it would be better in 
every way.

Best,

ellis