 SpitefulCrowInsert Witty Tag HerePremium
join:2003-06-04
Berkeley, CA | Seen it! IBM is actually building 3 of these, I think. They have one that's still under construction at the TJ Watson Research Lab in Yorktown, NY (where my dad works, so I got to go see it). The architecture is quite impressive - composed of dual-CPU units in one chip. Two of those chips are on a card, 16 of those cards go on a board, 16 of those boards make up a frame, and two frames make a rack. So one rack has 2048 CPUs in it. They use a custom bus to interconnect CPUs in what can be abstracted in a 3-dimensional torus (each one talks to the CPUs "above", "below", "in front", "behind", and to the "left" and "right" of it.) The boards and racks communicate with each other and the storage units (robotic tape units and storage servers) over GigE. The whole thing takes up a huge room with lots of air-conditioning.
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Shades of the matrix I gather.
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Samwoo
join:2002-02-15
Rancho Palos Verdes, CA | reply to SpitefulCrow
hmm. how much bandwidth would you need to connect the three complete machines together... |
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SpitefulCrowInsert Witty Tag HerePremium
join:2003-06-04
Berkeley, CA | At least a few lambdas on a multimode fiber directly connecting them. I highly doubt that the protocol used to communicate is IP-based. |
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