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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Petz who wrote (195226)	4/26/2006 11:11:12 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Petz, Does his make Cray obsolete, or do they have a leg up on the competition in an expanding (though small) market? I think this, plus future availability of co-processors in Opteron slots greatly challenges Cray XD1 (which is just a fast cluster), assuming someone builds some an extremely fast, low latency, high bandwidth HT switch. If an independent third party builds is and makes it available to everyone who asks, Cray may have competition in this market. As far as XT3 (Red Storm) system, that one uses global shared memory, as far as I know, and I don;t know if it is feasible to go to that extent without some Horus like chip, or with some, still un-announced feature of AMD Direct Connect Architecture 2.0 with a more advance memory coherency system. But I wonder what kind of effect this may have on more traditional HPC clusters. The traditional ones are connected using Ethernet, which is high latency, not so high bandwidth, but cheap. The next level up is what Pathscale is selling, which is a a lower latency cluster, where there are some infiniband cards plugged in HTX slot. I guess it depends on cost of this solution. Cray may have an opportunity to jump on this first, and bring their XD1 to the next level, and become a leader in this market. But it also will cost Cray some leadership they have now. Cray has already invested money into low latency mesh type connection between cluster nodes, so making this available to others will make some IP obsolete. If someone (Cray) can make this within the same ballpark (costwise) as the cheap (ethernet connected) HPC clusters, HPC cluster would be obsolete, and shift to this approach. The way I imagine this (all of this assumes HT switch) would be a backplane with a switch inside, allowing plug in of blades. The backplane would have HTX slots, and blades would plug into them. The switch would this way allow within a cabinet cluster of a number of blades. Now suppose this cabinet is, say 10" tall, you could have 6 of these cabinets in a rack, with another switch in the middle, with external (within 1 m) HT connections, connecting 6 of these cabinets. The big question is who is going to make the switch. AMD needs to seed this market, if nobody else is doing it yet. Remember, AMD bought a team (I forgot the name) of former Alpla employees, who made an early 4 port HT switch, that seemed to have gone nowhere. This switch was in some stage of completion some 3 years ago. These guys may be working under AMD for at least 2 years in Boston office. I have high hope that these guys (meaning AMD division) will have an HT 3.0 switch available next year. If so, AMD will leave Intel so far behind in this market that it is not pretty. BTW, applicability of such interconnect would go beyond HPC and SuperComputing. It could be used for, for example, a bunch of computational servers (without storage) and external high performance storage boxes. The solution for external storage available today have far less bandwidth and much higher latency. Local storage, within the servers themselves, has good latency and bandwidth, but can;t scale. Another possibility is the middle ground, which is servers with locally attached disks, connected with HT "network", where virtual RAID can span number of server boxes. Joe PS: regarding your current handle / nickname. I don't know if you frequent toy sections in stores. If not, you may not know that there is a new line of toys called Petz. I think these are pets for Bratz.