Big-Iron to Open Up for AMD 179
vincecate writes "Traditionally the key chips that have allowed companies to
scale multiprocessors to large numbers have been proprietary.
Some examples are the
Cray SeaStar,
SGI NUMAlink,
HP sx1000,
and the
IBM X3/Hurricane.
This proprietary paradigm is about to change to a more open one.
Two companies have developed key chips for
building large Opteron multiprocessors,
and they will be
commercial off-the-shelf parts.
PathScale has
released
InfiniPath
which can be used with an
Infiniband
switch to make
a high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect for a
supercomputer cluster.
The other company is
Newisys,
which
will soon release
the
Horus chip.
This chip will make it possible to build 32 socket
(64-core) shared memory Opteron systems."