hardware

Hardware page for ClusterGateOrg

GPU General-Purpose Computation Using Graphics Hardware.
GPGPU stands for General-Purpose computation on GPUs. With the increasing programmability of commodity graphics processing units (GPUs), these chips are capable of performing more than the specific graphics computations for which they were designed. They are now capable coprocessors, and their high speed makes them useful for a variety of applications. The goal of this page is to catalog the current and historical use of GPUs for general-purpose computation.
Intel CPU list
Myricom - home for Myrinet Myrinet is a cost-effective, high-performance, packet-communication and switching technology that is widely used to interconnect clusters of workstations, PCs, servers, blade servers, or single-board computers. Clusters provide an economical way of achieving:
- high performance, by distributing demanding computations across an array of cost-effective hosts. For "tightly coupled" distributed omputations, the interconnect must provide high-data-rate and low-latency communication between host processes.
- high availability, by allowing a computation to proceed with a subset of the hosts. The interconnect should be capable of detecting and isolating aults, and of using alternative communication paths.
- Conventional networks such as Ethernet can be used to build clusters, but do not provide the performance or features required for high-performance or high-availability clustering. Characteristics that distinguish Myrinet from other networks include:
  - Flow control, error control, and "heartbeat" continuity monitoring on every link.
  - Low-latency, cut-through switches, with monitoring for high-availability applications.
  - Switch networks that can scale to tens of thousands of hosts, and that can also provide alternative communication paths between hosts.
  - Network Interface Cards (NICs) that execute firmware to offload protocol processing from the host computer. The firmware interacts directly with host processes ("OS bypass") for low-latency communication, and directly with the network to send, receive, and buffer packets.
The InfiniBand -- Linux InfiniBand Project. The InfiniBand. Architecture (IBA) is an industry standard that defines a new high-speed switched fabric subsystem designed to connect processor nodes and I/O nodes to form a system area network. This new interconnect method moves away from the local transaction-based I/O model across busses to a remote message-passing model across channels. The architecture is independent of the host operating system (OS) and the processor platform.
IBA provides both reliable and unreliable transport mechanisms in which messages are enqueued for delivery between end systems. Hardware transport protocols are defined that support reliable and unreliable messaging (send/receive), and memory manipulation semantics (e.g., RDMA read/write) without software intervention in the data transfer path.
The InfiniBand specification primarily defines the hardware electrical, mechanical, link-level, and management aspects of an InfiniBand fabric, but does not define the lowest layers of the operating system stack needed to communicate over an InfiniBand fabric. The remainder of the operating system stack to support storage, networking, IPC, and systems management is left to the operating system vendor for definition. More on the InfiniBand architecture can be found here.
InfiniBand Trade association INTERCONNECT OF CHOICE FOR HPC AND DATA CENTER
InfiniBand is a high performance, switched fabric interconnect standard for servers. The technology is deployed worldwide in server clusters ranging from two to thousands of nodes. From Prudential Financial to Sandia National Laboratories, InfiniBand has become the standard interconnect of choice for HPC environments and is quickly becoming the preferred standard in high performance, enterprise data centers.
Founded in 1999, the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) is comprised of leading enterprise IT vendors including Agilent, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SilverStorm, Intel, Mellanox, Network Appliance, Oracle, Sun, Topspin and Voltaire. The organization completed its first specification in October 2000. In the past 12 months all major system vendors have announced InfiniBand products and hundreds of products have completed interoperability testing and are commercially available.
iSCSI: SCSI is Internet SCSI (Small Computer System Interface), an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities, developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). By carrying SCSI commands over IP networks, iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. The iSCSI protocol is among the key technologies expected to help bring about rapid development of the storage area network (SAN) market, by increasing the capabilities and performance of storage data transmission. Because of the ubiquity of IP networks, iSCSI can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.
- Linux Ethernet-Howto Frequently Asked Questions, Performance Tips, and many other topics
Hardware portal in Russia of course many topics in Russian
ASUS Corporation Motherboards
SUPERMICRO Motherboards
TYAN Motherboards
Tom's PC Hardware Guide - useful info on hardware
System Optimization and PC Performance (Hardware + software)
Microprocessor resources - mainly about Intel. On-line Intel documentation, news about Intel microprocessors, etc.
Foundry networks network products and technologies
KVM This is one of the KVM implementations. A KVM switch (with KVM being an acronym (acronym: A word formed from the initial letters of a multi-word name) for Keyboard, Video, Mouse) is a hardware device that allows a user to control multiple computer (computer: A machine for performing calculations automatically) s from a single keyboard, video monitor and mouse (mouse: Any of numerous small rodents typically resembling diminutive rats having pointed snouts and small ears on elongated bodies with slender usually hairless tails) . Although multiple computers are connected to the KVM, only one can be controlled at a time. Modern devices have also added the ability to share USB devices and speakers with multiple computers.
A user connects their monitor, keyboard and mouse to the KVM device instead of directly to the computers themselves and then uses special cables to connect the KVM device to the computers. Control is switched from one computer to another by the use of buttons on the KVM device, with the KVM passing the signals between the computers and the keyboard, mouse and monitor depending on which computer is currently selected. Most devices also allow control to be switched through keyboard commands (such as hitting a certain key, often Scroll Lock, rapidly two or three times). Some KVM devices also send signals to the computers that are not currently selected to ensure that they do not think that the keyboard, mouse and monitor are dis-connected.
KVM and KVM Over IP KVM over IP devices use a dedicated microcontroller and potentially specialized video capture hardware to capture the video signals keyboard and mouse signals, compress and packetize them, and send them over an Ethernet link to a remote console application that unpacks and reconstitutes the dynamic graphical image. This KVM over IP subsystem is typically connected to a system's standby power plane so that it's available during the entire BIOS boot process. These devices allow multiple computers to be controlled remotely across a wide area network, local area network or telephone-line using the TCP/IP protocols. There are performance issues related with LAN/WAN hardware, standard protocols and network latency so user management is commonly referred to as "near real time". And, remote KVM over IP devices offer much smaller matrix frameworks.

Andrey Ye. Shevel