On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 08:21:55PM +1000, Matt Hurd wrote: > This was not designed for HPC but for low-latency trading as it beats > a switch in terms of speed. Primarily focused on low-latency > distribution of market data to multiple users as the port to port > latency is in the range of 5-7 nanoseconds as it is pretty passive > device with optical foo at the core. No rocket science here, just > convenient opto-electrical foo.
If you go read up about the Blue Gene series of machines' networks, one of them is a "Eureka" network for global broadcasts. It's only a minor aspect of most scientific computations, though. There was even a very low cost, low-latency broadcast network out of Purdue called PAPERS that used the unused parallel port that used to be available in most servers. It was pretty amazing what they could do for so little $$, but I don't think they found that many applications. Presumably your customers are mostly using this for their stock tickers. Another application might be ad network; the broadcast stream would be ad opportunities... The mention of distributing lots of identical data to nodes would probably work better with bittorrent than this sort of gizmo. -- greg _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
