Author: Joshua Shriver
Date: 08:40:03 09/16/05
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A friend of mine uses myrinet on his opteron cluster. I've heard many good things about it with respect to having a relatively low latency. Kind of OT, but I remember reading that you once used crafty or another engine on a Cray before. Mind talking about it? From what I understand about Cray's, they're like a cluster in that they have a lot of cpu's all working together instead of one massive processor. Though it used some kind of special logic board for connecting them all together so no network like ethernet/myrinet/etc between nodes was needed (or something to that effect). With today's extremely fast processors, it seems the super computing market has died down, or at least switched. A couple years ago I went to a seminar at the Pittsburgh Super Computing Center and at the time they where almost entirely cluster based (Win NT or Linux). I talked with one of the gentlemen in charge after one day and was shocked to hear they had a Cray (1? 2?) just sitting in storage unused. Apparently it cost over a $1M just for the electricity bill, and it required some kind of special coolant that was expensive even for a small amount. So compared to super fast mainframes or supercomputers... it seems clusters give you the more bang for the bug. No special hardware needed, and cheaper costs. But what does this mean for computer chess? If money wasn't an issue, what would really be ideal hardware for the best computer machine? Top of the line IBM mainframe? 200 node Dual core-dual opteron cluster? Assuming that the code could utilize the hardware. Sorry for the ramble :) just something on my mind. Josh > >Yes. gigabit ethernet is high bandwidth, but still long latency. We have a new >128 node dual xeon cluster in the department using myrinet, which is lower >latency. Our old cLAN switch was the lowest latency I have ever seen, but it >was pricey as all hell... It was also not TCP/IP based...
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