Author: Ernst A. Heinz
Date: 10:40:28 12/01/97
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On December 01, 1997 at 12:44:54, Robert Hyatt wrote: >On December 01, 1997 at 10:00:54, Ernst A. Heinz wrote: > >>On December 01, 1997 at 09:23:00, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>> >>> [...] but getting machine time on a 16 cpu alpha is child's-play >>> compared to getting machine time on a T90... >> >>Well, the largest DEC Alpha SMPs I have heard of contain 12 CPUs >>and there are really not that many out there ... :-( >> >>Only DEC Alpha SMPs with 4 CPUs are widely available. >> >>=Ernst= > >our DEC rep has a 20 CPU version in a price-list he's looked at. Yes, in price-lists you find them but I have not yet heard of any such machine having been installed outside DEC or some other "hideous" corporation. >In addition, there are some non-disclosure things going on at DEC's lab >that I can't say anything about. I thought we were talking about "general availability" ... :-) >But needless to say, on the high-end >lots is going on. IE the SGI folks have large numbers of processors >(MIPS R10000's), Sun has a fair number (although the ultrasparc is >annoyingly slow), IBM has the SP for the PPC chips, so don't expect >Digital to lag too far back. :) True, but SGI's and Sun's machines scale to more processors only because each single CPU is so much slower than a high-end 21164a-Alpha. DEC's problem here is good communication/computation *balance*. >And then there is the Cray T3 series of machines, with a *bunch* of >alphas interconnected. (bunch == >1024)... not exactly shared memory >of course, but usable... Sure, very usable indeed but not easier to get computing time on than on a Cray vector supercomputer. BTW, there exist several T3x machines with <= 256 processors but not really many with 512 or >= 1024 processors. But I'd really like to have a large Cray T3E-1200 with lots of 600MHz Alpha-21164a CPUs for running a distributed/parallel version of DarkThought ... :-) =Ernst=
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