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Subject: Re: A really fast computer

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 06:30:35 09/04/00

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On September 04, 2000 at 03:45:39, Uri Blass wrote:

>On September 03, 2000 at 23:02:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On September 03, 2000 at 20:13:57, Aaron Gordon wrote:
>>
>>>What about with channel bonding in linux? For example you could get 6 100mbit
>>>nic's per pc to have 0.6Gbit (or if you've got some serious cash then 6 1gbit
>>>NICs). As soon as I get some money I'm going to try to experiment with the small
>>>linux cluster I've got here, maybe go with three 100mbit nics per pc.
>>>Anyway, it's a thought.. should help the bandwidth problem a lil'..
>>
>>
>>No, sorry.  Totally wrong idea.  The PCI bus _is_ the problem.  It can
>>sustain about 100mbytes/second.  If you put 6 NICS in the machine, you
>>are talking about roughly 10mbytes/sec per nic and you really can't drive
>>the things at 100mbits/sec...  I have been able to get roughly 70 mbits/sec
>>as an upper bound.  You could go to something faster (giganet) but then you
>>run into the PCI bus limit, and trying to bond more than one of those will
>>result in bus saturation...  at the 100mbytes/second limit...
>>
>>We are talking about the max bandwidth between the CPU and memory, which is
>>the bottleneck in the PC, and that is also where the C90 totally cooks the
>>PC.  IE the C90 has 16 cpus at a 2ns clock cycle (500mhz roughly).  In one
>>clock cycle, the machine can do 4 64 bit memory reads, and two 64 bit memory
>>write.  If you multiply that out, that is 48 bytes per cycle, times 16 cpus,
>>which is 500,000,000 * 48 * 16.  Compare that memory bandwidth to the PC
>>bandwidth and you see why the C90 came out at 30 million dollars when they
>>were first delivered.  That is roughly 4 x 10^11 bytes per second...
>>
>>400,000,000,000 bytes per second.  Think about that number for a second.  400
>>gigabytes per second...  compared to 100 megabytes per second...
>
>It suggests that the cray is 4000 times faster than the PCs but Cray blitz was
>not 4000 times faster than the PC's and the biggest number that I remember was
>7,000,000 nodes per second.
>
>Uri


It suggests that memory can be moved around 4000 times faster.  However, with
64 scalar registers, 8 vector registers that hold 128 words each, 64 temp
registers to back up the scalar registers, 8 address registers to calculare
addresses or other 32 bit values, 8 temp registers to back up those address
registers, you are able to keep lots of things in registers so that _every_
instruction doesn't have to access memory...
4000 would be a _maximum_ difference.



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