Tag Archives: networking

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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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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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 Gone with it will also be the outdated InfiniBand QDR hardware that was — until today — used in the fat-tree design tool.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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Many-core and InfiniBand: Making Your Own CPUs Gives You Independence

The headline sounds like the obvious thing: of course, if you can make your own CPUs for your projects, then you don’t have to rely on CPU manufacturers. “But wait”, you would ask, “Aren’t CPU design and manufacture very expensive?” … Continue reading

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Fat-tree and Torus Articles Now Available at arXiv.org

In case you wanted something more than an informal introduction into the world of fat-tree and torus networks — here you are. A formal problem statement (and solution!) in an academic form is given in these two articles hosted at … Continue reading

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Real Cost Comparison of Fat-tree and Torus Networks

Thanks to Mellanox Technologies, our tool that designs fat-tree and torus networks now operates with real life prices for InfiniBand hardware. Mellanox kindly provided list prices for the previous generation of switches, InfiniBand QDR: these figures are not likely to … Continue reading

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Latency Everywhere

People from the high-performance computing field have a clear understanding that performance of technical systems (of various nature) is characterized by two metrics: throughput and latency. People in other fields sometimes focus on either throughput or latency alone. For many … Continue reading

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Finally, A Topology-Aware MPI Implementation

Good news from the Supercomputing-2012 (SC12) conference: ten collaborators (including a talented team led by Dr. Dhabaleswar K. Panda) presented a paper on a new approach for assigning processes to compute nodes in InfiniBand networks. Roughly, it works as follows: … Continue reading

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Torus Network: As Round As It Gets

Fat-trees have great performance characteristics, but they can be costly for some installations. Blocking fat-trees can be used as an alternative, but if your computational task has locality of communications and is well suited to torus networks — why not … Continue reading

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