[MURG] My next computer: Octigabay 12k (fwd from jamesr@best.com)

[Eugen Leitl]

This is very useful hardware for our purposes. The price tag is yet
prohibitive, but in 10-15 years...

----- Forwarded message from James Rogers <jamesr at best.com> -----

From: James Rogers <jamesr at best.com>
Date: 07 Nov 2003 11:20:35 -0800
To: fork at xent.com
Subject: My next computer: Octigabay 12k
Organization: 
X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.2.2 (1.2.2-5) 

Just when I think the computing hardware world is getting boring and
predictable, somebody actually does something incredibly sexy and
moderately innovative.  More importantly to me, it is almost exactly the
computer I always wanted but nobody ever built.  And it even looks
pretty good.

For high-performance semi-commodity hardware, this one is hard to beat. 
The integral self-healing interconnect fabric and architecture is
unusual (non-blocking Terabit hardware MPI directly connected to the
processor) but insanely great, and the extreme scalability of the
ultra-low latency fabric will open up a world of problem domains that
are effectively inaccessible on conventional supercomputing clusters,
including the algorithm spaces I'm typically interested in.


http://www.octigabay.com/


The part about tying an FPGA to an Opteron (each pair of Opterons share
a very local user programmable FPGA) is pretty cool too.  Did I mention
that the fabric was designed to scale (including latency) with excellent
linearity to 12,000 processors?  Damn.  Oh yeah, it runs Linux by
default.

Someone made a list of all the geeky cool things one could theoretically
do to make the ultimate computer, and then actually built it. If it is
even half as good as they claim it will still be killer.  Shipping in
volume in early 2004.

I want one.  Badly.

-James Rogers
 jamesr at best.com



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-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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