On 2011-02-25, at 9:56AM, Ellis H. Wilson III wrote: > > I guess I'm lost on why this would be really useful, especially from a > beowulfery perspective. It's not like any sane Beowulfer would pay a > premium for Macs just to have this interconnect when they could just get > some old IB hardware.
It's not an Apple thing, it's an Intel thing; presumably it'll be rolled out on PC hardware soon enough too (and I think if this had first been introduced on (say) Dell boxes we wouldn't be seeing the knee-jerk skepticism from some corners that we are.) It looks like it comes built into the chipsets, eg, you wouldn't need a separate "thunderbolt" board. Whether it scales up remains to be seen, of course, but hooking up a bunch of machines to something approximating a shared PCIe bus with no additional hardware seems like it could be genuinely interesting, if it works like that. If not, well hey, it's a fast adapter bus, and faster data transfer is good, even if just to peripherals. - Jonathan -- Jonathan Dursi <[email protected]> SciNet, Compute/Calcul Canada _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
