[Beowulf] Intel’s 800Gbps cables headed to cloud data centers and supercomputers

[Kilian Cavalotti]

Hi all,

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 9:22 AM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>> Intel got into the game because without increasing network speeds, there wasn't much of a need for faster processors. We all know that Intel has bought QLogic and is spending a lot money on high-speed interconnects.
>
> are they?  I see the occasional little-ish product-ish thing pop up,
> but not much vision.  thunderbolt appears to be a cul-de-sac to make Apple
> happy (they get off on being "special"...)  IB doesn't appear to be going
> anywhere, really (it'll always be a weird little non-IP universe.)
> this new connector (just a connector) looks exactly like "big version of the original optical thunderbolt".  how about pcie-over-whatever - is that going anywhere?  then there's all that blather about dis-aggregated servers (what about latency?!?).

With the release of Knights Landing, the standalone CPU version on the
Xeon Phi, Intel is supposed to introduce Storm Lake, a 100Gb/s host
fabric interface, which could provide CPU to CPU interconnection
between nodes. It will probably be based on the QLogic and/or Cray IP
they acquired, or maybe not, details have been scarce, but those
cables just look like another piece of the puzzle.

Cheers,
-- 
Kilian