Re: SMP scalability: 8 -> 32 CPUs

Torbjorn Lindgren (tl@fairplay.no)
Fri, 4 Dec 1998 12:16:26 +0100 (CET)


On Thu, 3 Dec 1998, Jason Riedy wrote:
> ASCI Blue Mountain is a cluster of O2000s with 6144 total processors. I
> believe it's set up to appear as a cluster of single machine images (1k
> processors), each of which is a NUMA, but I don't have access to it to
> check. I don't know if the cluster follows the same design as the
> individual machines (fuzzy hypercubes).

According to the information on the website it consists of 48 Origin2000
with 128 CPU's each. Each machine has 12 HIPPI-800 ports, connected via a
3-dimensional torodial interconnect (with 36 16-port switches).

The flyer notes that they plan to upgrade the interconnect in 1999 to
HIPPI-6400 and 32-port HIPPI-6400 switches.

Ref:
TOP500 Supercomputers: http://www.top500.org/top500.list.html
LANL: http://www.lanl.gov/Internal/projects/asci/bluemtn/bluemtn.html
(The Blue Mountain Flyer contains a lot of hard information about it)

> BTW, ASCI Blue Pacific, the 1344-processor IBM SP/2 version, is a cluster
> of 8-way SMPs (iirc). It has a pretty horrible memory latency problem
> inside a single node (it's as fast as talking to another node), but the
> _idea_ is to have a lot of really fast local memory, plus a trusted, fast
> connection to other SMPs.

4-way machines according to the information I found. Looks like they have
a new "machine" on their way, with a total of 5856 CPU's (1464 4-way SMP
machines) for "closed side" (classified stockpile stewardship computing ?)

>From the information it looks like they have 2/3 of these already, which
should put that relatively high on top500 list if it had been included.
Both uses 4-way 332 MHz PPC604e, but there were old notes about planning
to move to Power-3 in "1998". Looks like that have been delayed thought.

Ref: http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/bluepac/

Lots of interresting links in that top500 list :-)

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