at SC99

19 November 1999, Portland Oregon. Myricom's SC99 exhibit drew frequent favorable commentary both for the advanced Myrinet products displayed and for the art-gallery-inspired design of the booth. Fifteen other SC99 exhibitors had Myrinets in operation, with both Myricom and Los Alamos National Laboratory connected by Myrinet on fiber to SCinet. The largest Myrinet cluster at SC99 was a 132-host Linux cluster on display in the SGI booth.

The centerpiece of the Myricom booth was the new M2LM-Clos64 Myrinet "Network in a Box" product, which contains 16 16-port crossbar switches in a Clos network. The Clos64 provides 64 Myrinet-LAN host ports and 64 Myrinet-SAN interswitch ports, along with microcomputer monitoring accessed through an Ethernet port. The Clos64 network provides full bisection between 64 hosts, and also preserves aggregate data rate between the host ports and the interswitch ports. The interswitch ports can be connected into a deeper Clos fabric to provide full-bisection networks up to any size desired, e.g., 1024 hosts, 8192 hosts, or even more.

Operating in the Linux corner of Myricom's booth was an 8-node cluster of VA Linux "Chiba City" hosts, and a 4-node, 8-processor cluster of HP Visualize PCs running a Fluent computational-fluid-dynamics demonstration. (<- If you do CFD, check this out!)

In the Hollywood corner was a cluster of two SGI 1400 Linux machines and an SGI Octane demonstrating Myrinet's capability of moving images at very high data rates between different nodes.

In the technical-computing corner, a pair of Compaq Alphas demonstrated the performance of 64-bit Myrinet/PCI interfaces using the GM API. Compaq had on display a Myrinet cluster with several types of Alpha EV-6 systems.

In the Internet corner, a pair of UltraSPARCs displayed in one window the map of the Myrinet, including all of the hosts and switches in the Myricom booth, the Myrinet switch and router in the SCinet booth, and the Myrinet in the Los Alamos National Laboratory booth. One of the UltraSPARCs displayed in another window a dynamic picture of the packet traffic inside one of the Clos networks. Meanwhile, the pair of UltraSPARCs were also running a netperf TCP/IP benchmark.

Myricom's "hero of the show" was Dr. Bob Felderman. In addition to setting up the demonstrations in the Myrinet booth and the Myrinet part of SCinet -- with very capable help from David Finucane and Nelson Escobar -- , Bob assisted other exhibitors with their Myrinets, and took advantage of after-hours opportunities to test Myrinet interfaces and software in new models of computers brought by other exhibitors to SC99.

We'll see y'all in Dallas, 4-10 November 2000, for SC2000!

Here is a roster of Myricom employees who worked in or helped set up the Myricom booth:


11/19/1999 -- the last entirely odd day (all odd digits) until 1/1/3111 !