Check out Infiniband

Post #139,654 by broomberg 2/3/04 8:06:41 PM Reply	Check out Infiniband [link\|http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/server/story/0,10801,89037,00.html?f=x76\|http://www.computerw...037,00.html?f=x76] Low latency data movement faster than any "regular" CPU can read it right now. I forsee a mixture of of faked SMP and NUMA based on Infiniband. It'll give the single system image for ease of programming. Clusters will pick up on the next step. For small data, high CPU partitioned compute tasks, Grids are the most cost-effective. But corporate programmers are lazy. They take a single system model, throw a few CPUs at it, and it seems to work. They don't have the budget or the expertise to test real scaling. They release it, it become business critical, and the performance tanks. Right now the only easy fix is SMP. I think we will hit a price sweet spot where 4-8 CPU boards are cheap and the next step becomes prohibitive compared to clustering. Mix in infiniband connections and you have nice building block scalability.
Post #139,662 by dmarker 2/3/04 9:21:53 PM Reply	Re: Check out Infiniband - Tks had not seen it before In the mid 90s I did some presentations on ATM & how it was likely to provide the needed backbone bandwidth for the Internet to grow. An ISP in Singapore grabbed hold of me after one show & set about explining to me that as good as ATM was, it would lose out to Ether tcp/ip wholely because ATM required replacing what was already working (even if tcp/ip was not super efficient). He turned out to be right. Am not sure yet if Infiniband fits into this category (will read up on it a bit more). Tks for the link. Doug Marker
Post #139,675 by broomberg 2/3/04 11:33:15 PM Reply	Apples and Oranges ATM was for carriers who needed the small frame with the QOS for voice. It was way too expensive to the average company to use, and the expenses were ongoing. There were comparable speed alternatives at the next level down that most connections used, that were cheaper, and nobody cared about the latency for IP. Infiniband is not that much more expensive than GB was 2 years ago (if that), while allowing for many times the throughput. Once you buy it, you gain the speed and you are not paying ongoing (unlike the ATM comparison) cost. Once in, nobody is going to sell you on a cheaper alternative. It shows huge expandability based on current tech, just by adding wires. Can't compare the two. While you can ride TCP/IP over it, that is a huge waste. Native protocol is MUCH faster. This is not a network technology, this is a bus extender which is faster than all current busses. I think the only thing that compares are memory crossbars in the current SMP boxes. And as a bus extender, you can then build real SMP via building blocks. Or really fast NUMA when the SMP locks get to be too much overhead.
Post #139,674 by dmarker 2/3/04 11:22:30 PM 2/3/04 11:35:50 PM Reply	I found this diag on IBM site [link\|http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/grid/library/gr-heritage/\|http://www-106.ibm.c...rary/gr-heritage/] Halfway down is the diag that positions network perf etc: in relation to benefits of GRID This introduction to GRID compares GRID with Clustering, CORBA & Peer-2-Peer. It handles the comparison quite well as the writer knows what he is talking about & seems to hit all the key points. Re Corba for example, he highlights the incompatibility of Corba with the web (exploitation of http & the lack of use of web end-point identiites). Web Services builds on the best of Corba by solving the shorcommings just mentioned thus taking full advantage of the web and best-of-all introduces the concept of dynamic late binding between interfaces. Something that Corba can't do. Doug M Edited by dmarker Feb. 3, 2004, 11:35:50 PM EST Expand All History

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