Comment Re:Cray has some points. (Score 1) 435
I sat next to the product manager for this on a plane back from Australia.
The concept is the same as their Red Storm supercomputer currently under construction. A google search will popup that Red Storm is a massive AMD64 cluster.
The XD1 is as follows:
A 64+ processor machine using AMD Opterons with a single Hyper transport link
Each of these processors are then connected by an FPGA and the Hypertransport link.
Then out of the 64 processors a subset of aroung 6 are used as service/control/maintenance. These processors run SUSE Linux.
The machines also accept standard PCI cards.
So before people go crazy, relaize that this machine is basically a linux cluster with a very fast interconnect. (6GB/s versus 100MB/s for Myrinet)
The only non COTS item in these clusters are the FPGA routers and some cooling.
The concept is the same as their Red Storm supercomputer currently under construction. A google search will popup that Red Storm is a massive AMD64 cluster.
The XD1 is as follows:
A 64+ processor machine using AMD Opterons with a single Hyper transport link
Each of these processors are then connected by an FPGA and the Hypertransport link.
Then out of the 64 processors a subset of aroung 6 are used as service/control/maintenance. These processors run SUSE Linux.
The machines also accept standard PCI cards.
So before people go crazy, relaize that this machine is basically a linux cluster with a very fast interconnect. (6GB/s versus 100MB/s for Myrinet)
The only non COTS item in these clusters are the FPGA routers and some cooling.
