Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[j3pflynn]

PathScale promises major Opteron cluster boost

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/11/17/pathscale_opteron_ib/

Hmmm... interesting.
...PathScale plans to release a half-height adapter within 30 days, which will be small enough to fit vertically in 2U servers. The product will sell for $795 – down from $895 for the current full-size product.

PathScale's major claim to fame is that InfiniPath reduces latency issues in larger Infiniband clusters in a pretty dramatic fashion. The company has benchmarked the hell out of the product, showing us sheet after sheet of results. You can find a condensed version of the data here. Of real note is the 1.32 microseconds for MPI latency.

Industry watchers know that after a slow start Infiniband has taken off in the last year with the high performance computing crowd flocking to the interconnect. But while Infiniband provides solid bandwidth, it has continued to suffer from latency issues.

"As you scale and build larger clusters, the latencies get worse," Rosenthal said. "So, the larger the cluster, the bigger the advantage you see with PathScale."

Mellanox delivers competing gear and has one advantage in that it can play in the PCI-Express/Xeon server world too. PathScale's product currently plugs right into Hypertransport slots on Opteron-based servers only. In the first quarter of next year, Pathscale will fix this by delivering a PCI-Express product but thinks latencies will come in around 1.67 microseconds because of limitations in PCI-Express versus AMD's technology.

Also coming early next year is the OptiPath MPI (message passing interface) tools package.

"One of the problems with MPI is that you need a doctorate in computer science to program in MPI," Rosenthal said. "This will make writing MPI applications much easier...."