Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: linux-kernel-digest V1 #2914 | Date | Mon, 30 Nov 1998 21:32:51 -0500 | From | Paul Barton-Davis <> |
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Stephen C. Tweedie writes:
( on using 1024 cpus)
>Binding that many CPUs together is hard! You tell me how you plan to do >it, and _then_ I'll tell you whether clustering is faster. :)
I'd do it the same way that KSR did, except that I'd use off the shelf processors. Cornell, I think, had a 1024 node KSR-1 and maybe even a 1024 KSR-2. They never did get all the kinks out of their cache coherency protocol, but I think that between them and Alewife, it could probably be done.
Next question, however: why ? Problems that benefit from this level of parallelism using general purpose microprocessors (as distinct from the PDP-neural-network kinds of parallelism) are typically well served by clustering.
This "why" question, along with the fact that UP speeds keep making various MP configurations redundant a couple of years after their owners spent big money on them, have been the bugbear of most large-scale MP designs.
--p (still angry that UWashington could spend $1M on a KSR and then throw it away a year later)
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