Pricing Announcement
21 April 2004

Price Reductions for Myrinet/PCI-X Interfaces

Myricom is pleased to announce the latest price reductions for Myrinet/PCI-X interfaces. These price reductions are effective for product shipments on or after 21 April 2004.

The list price of the popular M3F-PCIXD-2 "D card" Myrinet-Fiber/PCI-X interface is now $595. That's a $100 (14%) reduction.

The list price of the high-end M3F2-PCIXE-2 "E card" Dual-port Myrinet-Fiber/PCI-X interface is now $995. That's a $200 (17%) reduction.

Myricom is able to reduce the list prices at this time due to the favorable effects on costs of the high production volumes of these products.

D card: The D card was introduced in May 2003, and was immediately a high-volume product. As demonstrated by their use in 34 new Myrinet clusters in the November 2003 TOP500 list, systems with up to 1408 nodes, the D cards have been very successful in yielding high application efficiency and scalability in production clusters. In hosts with PCI-X slots, with either GM-2 or MX software support, D cards achieve user-level undirectional data rates of ~248MB/s, and summed-bidirectional data rates of ~490MB/s, closely approaching the data rates of the 250+250 MB/s Myrinet-Fiber port. The user-level MPI latency is ~6.8µs using MPICH-GM over GM 2, or ~4µs using MPICH-MX over MX. Netperf unidirectional TCP/IP ethernet-emulation performance with GM-2 and Linux 2.4 or 2.6 kernels is more than 1950 Mbits/s at ~25% CPU utilization (Xeon hosts).

E card: The E card was introduced in October 2003 to provide an alternative to the D card for applications requiring even higher communication performance. In addition to the dual Myrinet-Fiber ports, the E card uses a 48% higher clock rate for a higher firmware instruction rate and a higher local-memory data rate. GM-2 and MX present the identical interface (API) to the host computer with the dual-port E cards as with D cards. The interface firmware takes care of distributing packet data across the two ports. In hosts with PCI-X slots, with either GM-2 or MX software support, E cards achieve user-level undirectional data rates of ~490MB/s, closely approaching the aggregate data rates of the two 250+250 MB/s Myrinet-Fiber ports. The summed-bidirectional data rate of ~900MB/s is limited by the PCI-X bus and by firmware. The user-level MPI latency is ~5.5µs using MPICH-GM over GM 2, or ~3.5µs using MPICH-MX over MX. Netperf TCP/IP ethernet-emulation performance with GM-2 and Linux 2.4 or 2.6 kernels is 3767 Mbits/s at ~50% CPU utilization (Xeon hosts).

21 April 2004