hpcLine gains encouraging market acceptance - hardware and software aspectsMunich 30 October 2000 The hpcLine is installed at 18 sites in research, academic institutes and industrial research and development. Eric Schnepf gave an overview on the application areas, new hardware developments and the interconnect - system area network.
In the meantime the list of application software, commercial too, grew. Further parallel and computing performance improvements are expected through mpich with the new ScaMPI release. Eric Schnepf listed different areas. In the engineering applications he sees CAE automotive, construction, nuclear power plants and aerospace industry, in chemistry the drug design. In science in physics and chemistry as well as in the processing of experimental data. A special talk was given on virtual reality.
Fujitsu Siemens realised a new rack technology with compact nodes, 32 nodes (64 processors) from frontside and backside with a total of 64 GB memory. The next nodes will be based on the Primergy B210 boards with two-way Pentium III, 800+ MHz, 133 MHz frontside bus.
In mid 2001 two Intel Foster processors are expected and are under consideration as well as single processor Williamette nodes. Celsius workstations with two Itaniums require 800 Watt power supply and offer 16 GB SDRAM.
The new SCI LC-3 link controller chips allow a 3-D torus topology. Fujitsu Siemens actually offers two alternatives. Fast Ethernet is adequate and a low cost alternative, if there is not much communication. The new Scali SCI interface has low latency and improved transfer rates between nodes.
Fujitsu Siemens actually evaluates Myrinet 2000 with the ParaStation software, new interface cards PCI 64/66 MHz, very high transfer rates between nodes, a modular switch topology and mpich with an optimised middleware for PARTEC.
More information: http://www.hpcline.com.
Uwe Harms |
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