Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Correction hydra hardware

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 21:56:17 01/31/05

Go up one level in this thread


On January 31, 2005 at 13:35:02, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On January 31, 2005 at 13:03:43, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On January 31, 2005 at 10:14:28, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On January 31, 2005 at 10:01:16, Vincent Lejeune wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>news from 28/01/05 (more to come)
>>>>
>>>>http://hydrachess.com/hydra-scylla.html
>>>>
>>>>32 nodes (previous version has 16) , no information about CPU power and FPGA
>>>>cards yet ...
>>>
>>>It's 4 nodes.
>>>
>>>1 node = 8 processor Xeon.
>>>
>>>FPGA cards would get double speed. So must be between 30Mhz and 60Mhz. They only
>>>use development fpga cards. So never use the real power of fpga (which is
>>>printing your own processor which can run hands down at 600Mhz or more). They
>>>stick to development cards for some unknown reason to me.
>>>
>>>CPU power is not interesting at all of course, cards do the work.
>>>
>>>Vincent
>>
>>I hope not.  Old machine used 8 boxes with 2 cpus per box.  Going to 8-way xeons
>>is a performance killer.  The PCI bus just can't keep up.
>
>Ok the sheikh nor his righthand didn't know himself very well the architectural
>details which we will forgive them.
>
>I have accurate information now.
>
>It is a 32 node system. With each node a dual. They have however 32 FPGA cards
>because when ordering the person filling in the form (and i am NOT going to post
>who it was, but it was NOT the sheikh) confused nodes for cpu's.
>
>So they have a mighty 32 node myrinet now with 64 processors. However 32 cards
>so they run 64 processor effectively while serving with 32 cards which do the
>job. Cards at 55Mhz.
>
>Please note that PCI bus isn't the problem. They are using pci-x.

PCI-X falls flat if you have 8 cpus in a single box.  I have run on such
machines.  PCI does pretty well on 4way systems, but on 8-way, overall gain
seems to be 1.5x a 4-way which is not that great.  If you run a program that
runs out of cache quickly, this drops even further.


>
>Latency of one way pingpong is around 2.7 us with myrinet. That excludes the
>router costs which will be also at about 1 us i guess for random data traffic
>(up to 35 ns for bandwidth traffic).
>
>Vincent


All depends.  We have myrinet here and are probably going to use that in our new
opteron cluster when we buy it after the dual-core opterons start shipping in
quantity...



This page took 0.01 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.