Saturday, November 13, 2004

Technical competence

"Universities can cobble together a cluster of off-the-shelf PCs in a couple of weeks and create a relatively cheap cluster that takes at least the 20 spot on the Top500 fastest machines list" trumpets El Reg.

Keep in mind that the NICs and switch ports for networks other than Ethernet tend to be quite expensive (with a better price/performance ratio than 10GE at the moment).

Let's review:
(source material)


Rank Interconnect
1. Custom IBM
2. Custom SGI (NUMAlink) and InfiniBand
3. Custom NEC
4. Myrinet
5. Quadrics
6. Quadrics
7. InfiniBand
8. Custom IBM
9. Custom IBM (Federation)
10. Myrinet
11. Custom IBM (Federation)
12. Custom IBM (Federation)
13. Myrinet
14. InfiniBand, Myrinet, Custom NEC
15. Custom IBM
16. Quadrics
17. Myrinet
18. Myrinet
19. Quadrics
20. Custom IBM (SP2)

None of the top 20 (with the exception of the Riken Super Combined Cluster at #14) use Gigabit Ethernet as an interconnect.

So "relatively cheap" is cheap compared to what?

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