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

[Joshua D. Boyd]

Sridhar Ayengar wrote:
> gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 11:23:06AM -0400, John Francini wrote:
>>> that's exactly what the device is -- at least if you compare it to 
>>> the  info on the SiCortex web site.  This is the "developer version" 
>>> with  "only" 72 processors.  Their products scaled to as many as 
>>> 5,832  processors, according to the site.
>>
>> It runs Linux. While Linux is well know to work with multiple cores, 
>> has anyone
>> actually measured (or even properly modeled) that many cores?
>> Beowoulf or other similar clusters (MOSIX, etc) don't count as they 
>> are seperate machines, not all the cores in one.
>>
>> Note that they went out of business, did they ever ship any machines? If
>> so what?
> 
> Didn't SGI have big single-image Linux machines?

SGI ran linux on a 128p Origin (but didn't release it), and then later 
did the same with Altixs, before then cranky the Altixs up to 512 
processors.

Their larger systems (such as the 10240 processor machine for NASA) are 
made by taking the large SSI systems and connecting them into a cluster. 
  So, the 10240 processor machine is a cluster of 20 Altixs.  The 20 
machines are cross-connected by infiniband.  I'd love to see the network 
topology they chose.  I'm guessing that each system had many IB links 
(more than the normal number of 4x or 12x links that is).