Nifty niftyompi Mitch wrote:
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 12:26:54PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
andrew holway wrote:
Hi
If you wanted to buy an smp machine of 8, 16 or 32 sockets, what would
be your options?
x86 architecture? Others?
To what purpose?
Why so many sockets, for Beowulf?
You would have to ask Andrew, though we have seen folks needing huge
memory spaces as the driving factor for single systems with many sockets
and lots of ram. In fact, at least one hedge fund we know went this route.
The Sicortex system has lots of cores and some of their smaller
development systems and might qualify if the goal is to research
SMP, NUMA, and single system memory image.
I don't know if you would call them SSI, and I don't remember if they
have strict coherency within them. This said, they have a very fast and
scalable fabric. It is an interesting system. Not a commodity box, but
quite interesting.
As fast as CPU cores are today, memory and coherency protocols will hobble
the system in unexpected ways.... In some cases Infiniband bandwidth
Yup.
between single and dual socket systems is an improvement over large socket
count boxes. For some chassis large socket counts permit more RAM...
This is the important thing. I still don't see 8GB DIMMs as being
affordable for most users. I hope this changes soon.
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423 x121
fax : +1 866 888 3112
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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