Tag Archives: networking

Will We Ever See InfiniBand in Desktop Computers?

Posted on July 31, 2014 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

[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 →

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Exascale Supercomputers: Anything but Cheap

Posted on March 31, 2014 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Exascale Supercomputers: Anything but Cheap

Building Fat-Tree Networks with Ethernet Hardware

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Building Fat-Tree Networks with Ethernet Hardware

648-Port InfiniBand FDR Switches Added to the Database

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 Gone with it will also be the outdated InfiniBand QDR hardware that was — until today — used in the fat-tree design tool.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 →

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on 648-Port InfiniBand FDR Switches Added to the Database

Many-core and InfiniBand: Making Your Own CPUs Gives You Independence

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in Ideas, News | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Many-core and InfiniBand: Making Your Own CPUs Gives You Independence

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

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in News | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Real Cost Comparison of Fat-tree and Torus Networks

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in News | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Latency Everywhere

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in Miscellaneous | Tagged , | Comments Off on Latency Everywhere

Finally, A Topology-Aware MPI Implementation

Posted on November 19, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Finally, A Topology-Aware MPI Implementation

Torus Network: As Round As It Gets

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

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 →

Posted in News | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Torus Network: As Round As It Gets