SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
The water cooling links into the nodes through the front of the chassis, which is to the right in this picture. The chassis weighs a little more than 300 pounds fully loaded. A dozen of these, plus up to 1PB of local storage, can be put into a specially designed rack. This rack delivers 98.3 teraflops of number-crunching power.
The Power7 IH node hub/switch network
The hub/switch at the heart of the Power7 IH node and linking them together is the secret sauce of this machine. Benner would not elaborate much on this network, but did confirm that it borrows ideas from the "Federation" SP hub/switch IBM created. This was for ASCI Blue and other supers running AIX and InfiniBand switches and related InfiniBand technologies Big Blue has been using to link Power5 and Power6 processors to remote I/O drawers for years.
Benner did brag that the hub/switch technology in the IH node "was better than both" Federation and InfiniBand, and said that one of the key distinctions is that it presents a two-level topology to all nodes in the network of machines. Within a node, all of the processors are linked to each other electronically through the motherboard and controlled by the IH node hub/switch.
The optical interconnects mount onto the top of the hub/switch - the squares on the top are actually comprised of a grid of small optical transceivers, with each square delivering 10 Gb/sec of bandwidth, according to Benner. The hub/switch module and the Power7 IH MCMs are put together in IBM's Bromont, Quebec, facility in Canada, which is also where Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360 chip packages are manufactured. IBM's East Fishkill, New York, wafer baker is where the Power7 chips and the chips that create the hub/switch are cooked up.
The way the Power7 IH node interconnect works is simple: most of the optical interconnects that come out of the backend of the box are used to link all of the nodes into a supernode, which is four drawers of capacity rated at 32 teraflops. The hub/switch interconnect shown at SC09 can currently scale to 512 supernodes, which works out to 16.4 petaflops. (IBM is going to have to overclock this puppy to 4.88 GHz to hit 20 petaflops, apparently.)
Benner said that the hub/switch module delivered a 1,128 GB/sec - that's bytes, not bits - in aggregate bandwidth. That is 192 GB/sec of bandwidth into each Power7 MCM (what IBM called a host connection), 336 GB/sec of connectivity to the seven other local nodes on the drawer, 240 GB/sec of bandwidth between the nodes in a four-drawer supernode, and 320 GB/sec dedicated to linking nodes to remote nodes. There is another 40 GB/sec of general purpose I/O bandwidth. ®
COMMENTS
@Kebabbert
In your rush to bad mouth the competition you've managed to confuse yourself w.r.t. the technical details. Please reread the article a bit more carefully.
If you look closely you'll see the 100GBps bandwidth you're quoting is only the memory bandwidth per chip. You're forgetting about I/O and the SMP network.
Take a moment and Google this year's Hot Chips presentations. According to what was presented, bandwidth for each Power7 chip:
Memory: 100 GBps
I/O: 50 GBps
SMP: 360 GBps
Total Bandwidth for a single Power7 chip: 590 GBps
Your posts contain several additional technical mistakes/misunderstandings but enough people have already jumped on your case over it, I won't pile on.
@Kebabbert
"YOU CAN NOT ADD ALL BANDWIDTH, BAND WIDTH DOES NOT ADD UP!!!!"
Calm down. You're perfectly aware that's how they report the number to the press. You and I may not like it but that's the way they do it. I made a point of providing the breakdown of SMP, Mem, etc bandwidths because of this.
If you look back at your own comments you'll see that I was responding specifically to this comment of yours:
"However, IBM stated that the Power6 has 250GB/Sec bandwidth. And now, in this article it seems that Power7 has 100GB/sec bandwidth? Has the Power7 lower bandwidth than the Power6? Why is that?"
You, yourself, chose to compare the total aggregate Power6 bandwidth to only the memory bandwidth on Power7 and claimed the bandwidth from Power6 to Power7 was reduced. If you want to use the 250 GB/Sec figure for Power6 then you need to compare it to the 590 GB/Sec figure of Power7. If you want to use the 100 GB/Sec memory bandwidth for Power7 then you'll need to compare it to the same memory bandwidth figure for Power6 (you can Google it if you like, I kept finding the peak figure). You could also compare the peak memory bandwidths though those are less meaning full (50GB/sec for Power6 vs 180GB/sec for Power7 - according to a recent CNET article).
Whatever you do, you need to do an apples to apples comparison. Your previous comment compared an apple to the entire produce section.
"[...] That pisses me off. I dont mind if IBM's Power is faster, but I hate lies and FUD. [...]"
I understand your frustration but your passion for SUN's products is giving you a bad case of tunnel vision. Spreading even more FUD is not going to accomplish much. Both companies make good products and neither one is the perfect solution in every case. One is the right answer for some problems, the other is the right answer for another set of problems, some problems can be solved by both and some can't be solved well by either. Blindly screaming "SUN GOOD, IBM BAD" while misquoting figures and misinterpreting values accomplishes nothing.
@Kebabbert
Kebabbert, you need to educate a bit more before posting such a mess.
Clock frequency has little in common with CPU performance in this case. Single Power7 core is faster than single Power6 core, because P7 has out of order processing.
Other assumptions of yours are wrong as well. Reading Sun whitepapers is not good enough.
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