Microcontrollers/ASICs v. General Purpose Microprocessors -- WAS: Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[Mark Hahn]

> > I'm personally not running a cluster, but if you look into the
> > Beowulf list archives, people are citing impressive numbers.
> 
> Beowulf performance is _inversely_proportional_ to communication load.

that's either tautological or wrong.

> Applications scale far more linearly when the slower 10GbE are not used
> than the local, HyperTransport interconnects (assuming Opteron).  From

oranges are easier to peel than apples.  what was the question?
10GE is a different category of thing than HT.

> what I've seen, no one is getting anywhere close to 1GBps over layer-2
> communication with 10GbE for clustering.  I'm talking about when you're

myri 10G does.

> because 1GBps won't cut it.  Beowulf is not even applicable!

you have some weird ideas of what Beowulf is.

> Furthermore, the new, preferred solution is to use HTX (HyperTransport
> eXtension) Infinibind cards, which will give you about 1.8GBps real-

are you trying to spell "InfiniPath"?

> (in raw transfer terms) it's faster than GbE.  But even then, you don't
> use Beowulf for applications where you're taxiing the interconnect
> (database, file, etc...).

afaikt you're claiming that beowulf is low-bandwidth.  that's just weird!