[geeks] anyone know about this? 72-core, 48GB computer?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 09:02:49PM +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

>> However, in addition to liking MIPS, this system uses a proprietary
>> interconnect which could be interesting, if for no other reason than the
>> somewhat odd connection graph (Kautz) that appears to be made of
>> interconnected rings.
>
> What happened to that? Now that the company folded, did the technology end
> up being bought? Will it sit in patent hell until they expire or no one
> pays the maintainance fees? 

The company is still in the process of selling assets.  Their compilers
(a commercial fork of Open64, which was originally from SGI with some of
the core pieces gutted) were just sold to Cray at the end of August.  No
one knows currently what is happening with the rest of the IP.

>> It is also possible that there are nice instruction set properties
>> compared to Atoms.
>
> I don't know what's in the dual core ATOM's?

Generic SSE3 and AMD64 I guess.  

> You must know different people than I do. Most of the people I know learned
> HPC computing on Intel (MOSIX was developed here at Hebrew U), and there
> are zillions of beowoulf clusters out there based on PC's. I knew someone 
> who put together one based on Alpha PC clones (PC clones with Alpha 
> instead
> of Intel chips), but they are all probably long gone.

We (my employer) find little corresponance between skill with x86 and
skill to deal with OS issues, threading issues, cluster communications
issues, etc.  OTOH, people who do the other things seem to be able to
pick up x86 or the platform we are using well enough.  Our compiler
teams comes from x86 and IA-64 and seems to find little hardship to
switch CPUs.