Suspected as much

Suspected as much

Posted Apr 13, 2004 19:33 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256)
In reply to: Surprised? NOT! by snitm
Parent article: Cray CTO: Linux clusters don't play in HPC (Search Enterprise Linux)

I suspected that their XD1 might be just an Opteron cluster with some proprietary interconnect --- as I said in my first post it would remain to be seen if this interconnect would beat out Infiniband, Myrinet, or SCI (scalable coherent interface).

To hear that it *is* Infiniband based answers that question. It would have been nice if Dr. Terry had just said that rather than trying to FUD his way into the news.

As many peoople pointed out in the ./ thread on this story --- ultimately the performance of a cluster vs. SMP vs. mainframe vs. monolithic supercomputer (vector processor) is going to depend on the program design. Some algorithms are partitionable and some impelementations and software designs take advantage of different parallelization trade-offs better than others.

They don't say what OS they'd be running (Unicos?) but I'd be amazed if Linux isn't ported to the XD1 platform in short order. Cray might not do it or condone it, but the users almost certainly will.

JimD

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