Author Archives: Konstantin S. Solnushkin

The Journey Ends Here

Hi all! It’s been several exciting years, but things do change, life goes on, and I work in a different field now. This website will remain online in the hope it will be useful, but comments will be disabled, and … Continue reading

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Cluster Design Tools ver. 0.8.5 — Final!

The final version of the Cluster Design Tools, ver. 0.8.5, was released in June 2015 and was made available for download. The changes are mostly about letting the software suite run with newer Python versions — 3.4.2 and higher. This … Continue reading

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Cluster Design Tools Updated (ver. 0.8.4), SADDLE Included

The recent release of Cluster Design Tools, version 0.8.4, is different from previous releases. First, it now incorporates SADDLE, a Python-based scripting language for automated design of cluster supercomputers and data centres, which was announced earlier. Second, it now includes … Continue reading

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Will We Ever See InfiniBand in Desktop Computers?

[Update: the post is not actually about InfiniBand as such, it’s more about convergence that can be brought by the new Intel Omni Scale Fabric :-) Please see the comment below the post, and thanks for your time!] When I … Continue reading

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SADDLE Presented at the ISC’14 Conference in Leipzig

SADDLE,  the CAD tool for cluster supercomputer and data centre design, has just been presented at the ISC’14 conference in Leipzig, Germany. SADDLE can help you choose the best hardware by analysing its price/performance ratio, and then it will design … Continue reading

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Cost: The Biggest Pothole on the Exascale Road

Recently, industry analyst John Barr wrote at the ISC blog about “Potholes on the Road to Exascale”. John speaks about a unified programming environment that should be able to support all sorts of computing devices of the future. That’s right: … Continue reading

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Exascale Supercomputers: Anything but Cheap

Science and engineering both rely on the continuous increase in supercomputing performance. Back in 2009, it was believed that exascale machines will become available by 2018 — nine years ahead seemed like a lot of time. No one knew how … Continue reading

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Hungarian Goulash and Parallel Cooking

Most cooking recipes are formulated improperly: they list actions required to prepare food, but fail to explicitly mention which of those actions can be run in parallel. This leaves you guessing how much time you could save if you added … Continue reading

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Building Fat-Tree Networks with Ethernet Hardware

Fat-tree networks work very well with InfiniBand hardware. At the same time, a fat-tree built with Ethernet switches may not always work: this is because switches must be able to discover multiple paths in a topology and balance traffic among … Continue reading

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648-Port InfiniBand FDR Switches Added to the Database

It’s Christmas time… Just a few hours, and year 2013 will become a thing of the past. Gone with it will also be the outdated InfiniBand QDR hardware that was — until today — used in the fat-tree design tool. … Continue reading

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