High
performance computing (HPC) has come of age. No longer is it the preserve of computer
scientists in research labs, plugging together printed circuit boards and writing
new flavours of parallel operating systems. HPC is a stable, mature technology,
an enabling technology for an ever increasing number of scientists and researchers
wishing to build and run computational models in their own particular disciplines.
HPC has finally delivered on its promises.Here we take a look at the current state
of high performance computing from the perspective of the European user community,
and assess the needs and aspirations of this community in terms of where HPC might
be going, and where, perhaps, it should be going. We aim to capture a snapshot
of HPC activities, from the technology itself through related services to the
direct views of its European user base, and attempt to draw the whole together
into some form of roadmap for large scale computing in the twenty-first century.Quadrics
Supercomputer World (QSW) offer a PCI-compatible high-performance ``fat tree''
interconnect based on the original Meiko Computing Surface network. Called QsNet
and built from QSW's Elan III network chips and Elite III switch chips, it offers
some of the highest performance currently available in cluster networking systems..
The
QsNet network is currently used inside the UltraSPARC-II-based QM-1, and QSW plans
to produce systems in partnership with Compaq in the third quarter of 1999; the
first of these will be the Compaq ``Sierra''. It is as yet unclear whether QSW
intend to make the QsNet technology available as an ``off-the-shelf'' networking
product QsNet consists of two hardware building blocks: a programmable network
interface called Elan and a high-bandwidth, low-latency communication switch called
Elite. Elite switches can be interconnected in a fat-tree topology. With respect
to software, QsNet provides several layers of communication libraries that trade
off between performance and ease of use. QsNet combines these hardware and software
components to implement efficient and protected access to a global virtual memory
via remote direct memory access (DMA) operations.
