[rescue] SGI files Ch11 again, bought by Rackable for $25M

[Brian Roth]

The manual has the NUMA cabling defined for different sized systems. Using Craylink and expresslinks and I bet the HIPPI was used between the Meta Routers.

http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/download.cgi?coll=hdwr&db=bks&docnumber=007-4192-001

--- On Wed, 4/1/09, jodys at helluin.org <jodys at helluin.org> wrote:
From: jodys at helluin.org <jodys at helluin.org>
Subject: Re: [rescue] SGI files Ch11 again, bought by Rackable for $25M
To: "The Rescue List" <rescue at sunhelp.org>
Date: Wednesday, April 1, 2009, 1:27 PM

On Wed, Apr 01, 2009 at 11:18:17AM -0600, Robert Darlington wrote:
> HIPPI was the world's first gigabit networking system.  Friends of
mine
> worked with SGI to develop it, got an R&D 100 award out of the deal
etc.
> Major breakthrough at the time (late 1990s I guess, before my time there).
> When I came on, I was mostly handling software and OS stuff so I
didn't have
> my hands inside the machines too often.  I do remember seeing the thick
> cables though and having to work around them.  One "router rack"
with 4
> O2000 racks on each side with the heavy HIPPI cable interconnects.  So 9
> racks total per row, times 48 rows deep.   LOTS of cable.
> 
> Later we experimented with the Origin 3200 line, testing R bricks (routers
> for the ccNUMA interconnects) vs Myranet and such.   Good times.

Wow! Origin 2000 was 16 CPU per rack, so 9 racks times 16 is 144, 144
cpus times 48 rows is 6912 cpus. No wonder they used HIPPI, I believe that
Origin 2000, with the last routers, maxed out at 512 cpus. 

Just to clarify, HIPPI and NUMAlink are two seperate things. I imagine
that NUMAlink connected up Origin 2000 compute nodes into larger 
cc-NUMA systems, those larger systems then must have been interconnected 
with HIPPI. 

I have some fiber HIPPI gear for my SGI gear and, one of these days, I'll
get 
around to setting it up.

Jody
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