Sky's 9U multicomputer to 42 Gflop/sChelmsford 26 February 2001 The new Skybolt II VME 9U multicomputer from Sky Computers Inc. can accelerate interconnect speeds by a factor of 2x to 3x and provide fast-boot capabilities, especially important to mission-critical applications. An on-board Skychannel crossbar transfers data between compute clusters on the four Merlin MPC7400 daughtercards at 960 Mbytes/second, a 3x increase over the previous generation. Fully configured with four Merlins, which include 16 MPC7400 compute nodes, the unit delivers 42 Gflop/s of compute performance.
The
crossbar provides dual Skychannel connections off the board, doubling the speed
of the interconnect to 640 Mbytes/s. The dual boards double the I/O
capabilities. To further extend data transfer options, the product includes an
on-board front-panel data port capability for intelligent I/O.
An Intel support processor on the motherboard handles all of the system
functions, leaving the compute clusters free to take on the real-time processing
requirements of the system. A large flash memory aids in attaining a 10-second
boot for startup and initialization. On power-up the software monitor, kernel
and application are loaded into the working memory of the support processor and
compute clusters. Since the boards all boot in parallel, Sky said, the entire
16-board, 256-processor system can start a typical segmentation and reassembly
application in 12 seconds instead of the 7 minutes of other systems.
Single-unit list price begins at $75,000 including four Merlin compute clusters
(16 compute nodes per single slot).
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