Lots of hardware news follows (from www.aceshardware.com)....
Sun's New Big Iron Around the Corner? (HARDWARE)
Posted By Brian Neal
Thursday, February 8, 2001 - 2:58:45 PM
Thanks to Chris and Northyen for this link reporting on a
supercomputer being built at the Danish University of Technology (DTU)
using 7 systems donated by Sun, each boasting 24 UltraSPARC III
processors and either 36 GB or 24 GB of RAM. The systems are connected
using Sun's new Wildcat interconnect technology, and, together, they
deliver roughly 180 GFLOPS.
We speculate that Wildcat may use a NUMA or Simple COMA memory
architecture to enable a single high-performance machine image
(operating system) to span across all the systems in the cluster. Sun
has had a couple different projects on the subject, including one
codenamed Wildfire:
Our department is the owner of an experimental "beta" machine from
Sun Microsystem called "WildFire." WildFire unifies four symmetric
multiprocessors (SMPs) so they behave like a single machine. This
is done by replacing a processor board on each machine with a board
that acts like a proxy for the rest of the system. Wildfire can
dynamically switch pages between acting like a Cache-Coherent
Non-Uniform Memory Access (CC-NUMA) machine to acting as a Simple
Cache Only Memory Access (S-COMA) machine and back. The algorithm
uses is a variant of the competitive Reactive NUMA (R-NUMA)
developed by Falsafi and Wood [International Symposium on Computer
Architecture, 1997]. It is implemented with low-level
platform-specific modification to Solaris (in the HAT layer of the
VM system). Policies and mechanisms are separated.
Our big WildFire has 64 processors, 8GB memory, and 1TB disk. An
interesting project would be to study behavior of the existing
algorithm with microbenchmarks and applications and then to propose
or make changes.
Albireo, a project based on two E6000 servers also uses Wildfire:
The two servers are interconnected using the Sun WildFire
interconnect, which in effect creates a single shared memory of 8
Gbyte from the memories in the two servers. Albireo is currently
the only installation of the WildFire interconnect outside the U.S.
Each Sun Ultra Enterprise server architecture is the Symmetric
Multiprocessor (SMP). The WildFire system begins with the cabling
together these servers. The interconnect boards link and unify the
independent Ultra Enterprise servers so they become cooperating
nodes in a single (not clustered) new system. Many of the
properties of WildFire's SSM architecture are similar to SMP. But,
WildFire's gains over the SMP architecture in scalability and the
processing power comes from its ability to operate as a distributed
shared-memory system in both Cache-Coherent Non-Uniform Memory
Architecture(CC-NUMA) and Cache-Only Memory Architecture (COMA)
switching appropriately from one mode to another during runtime.
Finally, Wildfire's apparent successor, Wildcat:
On large multiprocessor systems using a single kernel:
We've had that on current generation for four years. We didn't
introduce it because we didn't think it was ready. We can do 112
processors under a project called "Wildfire." This one is called
"Wildcat."
This news may also be an indication that Sun's mid-range line of
UltraSPARC III-based servers, codenamed Serengeti, may be close to
launch. According to the article, DTU is said to be receiving their
seven systems within the next two months. The total value of the
hardware is said to be roughly $6 million, which means we can make a
rough estimate that, excluding the 4 TB storage, each system costs
around $700,000. Meanwhile, the list price for the current high-water
mark in Sun's server line up (excluding the E10000), the E6500, is
$655,000 for a configuration including 24 400 MHz UltraSPARC II
processors and 24 GB of RAM. This means that at worst, the new
Serengeti systems will be priced essentially the same as the current
Ex000 line, while at best they may cost significantly less, while
offering substantially greater performance in either case. |
