More info linked from ... Slashdot!?

Posted Dec 3, 2009 19:01 UTC (Thu) by MarkWilliamson (guest, #30166)
In reply to: Intel unveils 48-core cloud computing silicon chip (BBC) by clugstj
Parent article: Intel unveils 48-core cloud computing silicon chip (BBC)

In what is surely a sign of the End Times ;-) Slashdot has provided a link
that I think others here will find informative: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=825

The original Slashdot story is here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/12/02/215207/Intel-...
Processor

Amongst other things, the article notes that each node is dual core, so
there are 24 processing nodes on the chip. There are several memory
controllers. Cache coherency (between nodes, I assume) is not handled by
hardware - a bit of a departure for Intel.

As a result of these design decisions, one thing which immediately occurred
to me was that the design might be useful for partitioning into smaller
virtual machines, each of which has its own dedicated memory and doesn't
need to worry about cache coherency. The VMM layer would handle any
explicit coherency control when required. Interestingly, the BBC article
suggests that Intel are talking about running many OS instances on a single
chip so I guess this might be what they are really thinking of.

I wonder what pain would be involved in getting a commodity OS such as
Linux to span the nodes in the system by managing software cache coherency.
Intel must have at least considered that, I'd have thought...