| 22 June 2005
The exhibition floor in Heidelberg is crowded. In fact they could have easily sold exhibition space twice as large. That is one of the reasons, along with the fact that the world soccer games are in Germany in June next year, that the ISC conference will move to Dresden, in the eastern part of Germany. The large conference centre can accomodate a larger exhibition. Today, we visited and talked to Intel and Pathscale. Both are companies that deliver HPC hardware and software components, but this is where the similarity ends. Intel showed a first 4-processor Montecito based platform with 46 Gflop/s performance, a world premiere. Pathscale exhibits its new low latency InifiniPath Infiniband connector.
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Intel has on its booth the first working version of a 4-processor Montecito based platform. It demonstrates, for the first time, a sustained Linpack performance of 46 Gflop/s not matched by any other 4 socket platform today. Intel is not only working on hardware, but also on specific software to support the platforms as compilers, targeted at Intel platform. The recently announced Intel compiler version 9.0 is an example of that.
Surprisingly enough, there is still room for a new compiler vendor. Pathscale entered the market less than two years ago with a compiler suite aimed at supporting Linux clusters. Especially in the 64-bit market and more specific on the AMD processor, there was not anything efficient available, yet. In the mean time, Patscale has shipped dozens of compilers all over the world, mainly to research centres in teh US and Europe, but also to companies.
New companies should be single-product companies, that is the general rule of investors and venture capatalists. Lucky enough for Pathscale they did find some investors knowledgeable in ICT. Hence they have three rather different products. In addition to the compiler that is a hardware interconnect part called InfiniPath and OptiPath: tools for writing efficient MPI programmes. What is bringing focus in this product suite is that they are all products to enable efficient Linux Clusters. The company is not into Windows, and not into Unix, in fact it wants to follow the trend that is also visible in the TOP500: Unix is loosing ground very fast to Linux. Windows is not growing in the HPC market.
The InfiniPath product, just released, is a hardware part that connects a processor, typically an AMD Opteron processor, to an Infiniband network, using the Hypertext Transport standard (HTX). HTX is an alternative to PCI-E. One can put together low-latency clusters in this way, that are not too expensive. One company that is doing that is the Taiwanese company Iwill. They build for instance two-way and four-way computer modules that include InfiniPath. Ncie feature about Infinipath is that if you link it to more processors, the latency is lower than for one processor.
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