What are the future trends in high-performance inter.connects for parallel computers? [Panel 1]
Fabrizio Petrini, José Eduardo Moreira, Jaroslaw Nieplocha, Mark K. Seager, Craig B. Stunkel, Greg Thorson, Paul H. Terry, S. Varadarajan · 2004
Most interconnection networks provide some form of intelligence in the interface. Do you expect this to become a central feature in the future? Will it be possible to implement network operating systems in the interface? Do you expect that optical networks will become widespread? What are the trends in latency and bandwidth? Networks as Quadrics Elan4 and Cray XDl's already deliver 1.5 microseconds at MPI level. Is bandwidth technologically free? Will the I/O interface be the bottleneck? Will native support for collective communication be a central feature of a high performance network? BlueGenelL has shown that a thermally-aware supercomputer can be packaged in a small space, with a chip that integrates processors and interface. Will future interfaces be integrated with the processors in the same chip? How can a high-performance help to achieve fault-tolerance in a large-scale machine?