Author: Greg Lindahl
Date: 12:06:56 12/15/99
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On December 15, 1999 at 14:51:13, Will Singleton wrote: >I'm pretty clueless too. What's a cluster guy? How about FPGA? What does >routing a chip mean? Why are you interested in this? I did say send email, but hey, probably a lot of people will have the same questions, so: I design Linux clusters used for supercomputing. They are composed of a big pile of PCs (x86 or Alphas) connected with a network (ethernet or a gigabit network such as Myrinet) and software that makes it possible to write message-passing programs (MPI or PVM) to use all the CPUs in parallel. A typical use for the systems I design is weather forecasting. An FPGA is a programmable chip that, in this case, will sit on a PCI card and evaulates the strength of a given board quickly. Programming these chips is a highly specialized activity, and is called "routing". Deep Blue was an IBM SP2 (cluster with a gigabit network) and a bunch of ASICs on expansion cards. An ASIC is like a FPGA except it's not re-programmable. ASICs are faster than FPGAs, but you have to make them in large quantities to make them cheap. Today's FPGAs are faster than the ASICs used in Deep Blue. I'm interested in this for the publicity, just like IBM. -- greg
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