Countdown to SC2004
21 October 2004

"Now that's a Switch!"*

The new Myrinet switches for large clusters are now in full production. Myricom has already shipped the first 23 units to customers, including Clos configurations with 512 ports and Spine configurations with 1280 ports. Even with the substantial current order backlog, Myricom will be able to ship new orders of these products within approximately one month.

Please visit Myricom's SC2004 booth #1721 to see these switches in operation.

The switch pictured to the right has 512 ports, 256 host ports plus 256 interswitch ports. All of the interswitch ports are on quad-link ribbon fiber (note the ribbon-fiber cables on the right side of the photo above). Other configurations within this same 14U enclosure include a standalone 256-host full-bisection Clos network, and a spine switch with up to 1280 ports.

For clusters with 128 or more switch ports, these new products substantially reduce the cost of a full-bisection switch network in comparison with the earlier and smaller Myrinet-2000 switches. A product index, list prices, and technical specifications are available here. Additional technical documentation is in preparation.

These new products are based on a new Myricom custom-VLSI 32-port crossbar-switch chip, the XBar32. One of the new features of this chip, a protocol for interrogating the switch ID, greatly simplifies and speeds up Myrinet mapping. An early customer site using these new switches with mapping software that uses the switch-ID feature observed mapping of a 512-host cluster in ~3 seconds.

* "Now that's a switch!" Movie fans remember the classic scene in which Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee is approached on the streets of New York City by a punk who pulls a switchblade knife. Crocodile Dundee says "That's not a knife," as he draws his much larger Bowie knife. "Now that's a knife!" Thus, in describing Myricom's new Myrinet switches for large clusters, we like to say "Now that's a switch!"

21 October 2004