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A comment on IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design. Parent comment

Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by rbanffy on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @11:29AM (#18495072)
Speaking of SGI, I was expecting the Cray XC family to be able to do that with the ludicrously fast interconnects they have, but I couldn't find any mention of it.
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Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by gaius on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @01:41PM (#18496420)
No, an XC40 runs a kernel on each node, the programming model is MPI, not SSI with NUMA. It runs a minimalist Linux distro called CLE. The nodes are surprisingly small, in terms of memory too, 64 or 128G. Physically they are beautiful to look at, so clean, just a CPU and some memory and nothing extraneous. Cray really should do glass cases.
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Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by rbanffy on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @03:05PM (#18497194)
They used to make beautiful computers.
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Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by gnufx on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @02:35PM (#18496913)
The salient hardware difference is probably cache coherence in the SGI interconnect.
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Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by gaius on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @02:49PM (#18497035)
No, the Ares interconnect is brutally fast but it fundamentally isn’t doing anything as complicated as that. It acts as both storage and networking between the nodes.
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Re:IBM z14 Microprocessor and System Control Design by gnufx on Wednesday November 28, 2018 @03:20PM (#18555250)
I missed this at the time, but yes -- that's the point, in comparison with NUMAlink or whatever it is now. (s/Ares/Aries/)
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