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Subject: Re: Opteron HyperTransport

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 17:13:51 07/08/03

Go up one level in this thread


On July 08, 2003 at 19:42:11, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On July 08, 2003 at 11:49:39, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On July 08, 2003 at 00:33:09, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>>
>>>On July 07, 2003 at 23:33:48, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 07, 2003 at 11:30:34, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>
>>>>>The total bandwidth a 256 node machine with bricks of 4 processors will have
>>>>>then a total bandwidth of somewhere around: 12.4 Terabyte a second.
>>>>>
>>>>>Now *that* is very impressive.
>>>>
>>>>And imaginary I'll bet.
>>>
>>>Cray is supposed to be building a 10k processor Opteron supercomputer for Sandia
>>>Labs.  Its total aggregate bandwidth should far exceed 12.4TB/sec.
>>
>>Again, that is a theoretical peak, which assumes _all_ processors are
>>communicating with each other in such a way there are no conflicts or
>>hot spots.  The 48 gb/sec for a single T90 CPU doesn't have that kind of
>>assumption.
>
>Of course, for each processor, the bandwidth of a real vector CPU far exceeds
>that of any scalar CPU.  Have you seen specs for Cray's new X1 stuff?  I think I
>read something like 200GB/s/processor local memory bandwidth, via 128 RAMBUS
>channels or something insane.

They have _always_ been "insane" up there.  IE how many machines do you
know that can have 4096 _banks_ of memory that can all transfer data in
parallel?  :)

Of course, it is also insanely expensive.


>
>>>>>Especially for the price they will deliver it for.
>>>>>
>>>>>A 5000 processor vector machine now costs around 700 million dollar.
>>>>
>>>>Where can you find a "5000 processor vector machine?"
>>>>
>>>>I know where there is a 32 processor vector machine.  Nothing beyond
>>>>that that I know of, unless you start counting I860 type boxes.
>>>
>>>NEC Earth Simulator has 5120 NEC SX-7(?) vector processors.  Total cost was less
>>>than $400m.
>>
>>OK.  That's a cluster.  In that light Cray Research used to have a big cluster
>>of YMPs at their headquarters.
>>
>>I have run Cray Blitz on an SX in the past.
>>
>>>Here is a blurb about the chip, from the webpage:
>>>
>>>"Each AP consists of a 4-way super-scalar unit (SU), a vector unit (VU), and
>>>main memory access control unit on a single LSI chip. The AP operates at a clock
>>>frequency of 500MHz with some circuits operating at 1GHz. Each SU is a
>>>super-scalar processor with 64KB instruction caches, 64KB data caches, and 128
>>>general-purpose scalar registers. Branch prediction, data prefetching and
>>>out-of-order instruction execution are all employed. Each VU has 72 vector
>>>registers, each of which can has 256 vector elements, along with 8 sets of six
>>>different types of vector pipelines: addition/shifting, multiplication,
>>>division, logical operations, masking, and load/store. The same type of vector
>>>pipelines works together by a single vector instruction and pipelines of
>>>different types can operate concurrently."
>>>
>>>Each chip consumes only about 140W, rather than Vincent's assertion of 150KW.
>>
>>
>>The 150KW was for a machine like the C90/T90/etc.  125KW might just get them
>>started.  :)
>
>Yeah, the entire Earth Simulator system uses some 7MW of power.



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