Wait, how do you walk through all that?!?
Wow, I used to work as network technician long time ago when installing a CAT5 wires on a 5000 sq. ft office was hard. This is about 100 times harder looking… how do they even maintain the supercomputer? I wonder what happens if one of these go down. You are gonna have to be really good at walking over wires, which I am not.
MareNostrum’s Myrinet interconnect fabric requires four cabinets. Myricom did a nice job of reducing the cable count as much as they could by using quad-link ribbon cables between their switch elements. But with 12 separate switch elements in the fabric that means they still have a lot of cables and more cables means more connectors, more points of potential failure. They also use one cable per compute node, as is typically done in cluster configurations. Lots more cables, lots more connectors.
Contrast this with Sun’s Constellation System approach, which uses one large, ultra-dense InfiniBand switch (therefore no inter-switch cabling) and node connections that are bundled three per-cable and connected directly to Constellation’s ultra-dense blade chassis. This takes complexity management to the next level and makes petascale computing systems an achievable goal.
