June 3, 2006
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HPC Wire (05/05/06) Vol. 15, No. 18,Feldman, Michael
Originally developed in 2001 to furnish a low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect that improves on shared bus technologies, the HyperTransport open standard has drawn the attention of system designers who demand a high level of scalability and performance. The standard is maintained by the HyperTransport Consortium, a nonprofit that offers the technology to any vendor willing to become a member. Low-latency, high-speed interconnects are especially important in supercomputing, and the cost of proprietary interconnects has risen to become one of the most expensive parts of systems that rely on multiple commodity processors. HyperTransport is also used in other environments that require rapid data transfers, such as servers, network appliances, and even desktops. "Even though it's used in very high-end systems, it's also used in very low-end PC, with an eye to reducing the cost," said David Rich, president of the HyperTransport Consortium. "So the technology has to be very accepting of the quality of the signal integrity that's on the board. We can't specify a very expensive board manufacturing regimen to get the speed." With the recent 3.0 specification, HyperTransport can now be deployed for system-to-system connections, as well as linking processors to both peripherals and other processors. The processor native interface is a critical feature of HyperTransport, enabling its chip-to-chip connection to scale with the number of processors, unlike front-side bus designs, which demand adapters to link common buses such as PCI and AGP. HyperTransport supports buses of 2 to 32 bits in width, and the new specification can reach a maximum speed of 2.6 GHz. The improvements in HyperTransport have been introduced to increase both its functionality and speed to keep pace with the increasing speeds of CPUs and networks, while also adding flexibility to address the mounting specialization and complexity of computing systems.
For the complete article, see http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/646006.html
Posted by rab5 at 07:31 PM
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