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| The Sun E10000 Starfire Machine type: RISC-based distributed-memory multi-processor Models: E10000 Starfire Operating system: Solaris (Sun's Unix flavour) Connection structure: Crossbar (see remarks) Compilers: Fortran 77, Fortran 90, HPF, C, C++ |
| The Starfire E10000 is the largest of a series of Ex000 servers, where x can be 3, 4, 5, 6, 10. We only discuss this largest model as Sun has clearly positioned this machine themselves as a system for large-scale high-performance computing. The basic processor is a 2.5 ns cycle UltraSPARC processor with a Theoretical Peak Performance of 800 Mflop/s. Up to 64 processors are connected by a 64×64 crossbar, the largest crossbar employed commercially. This crossbar, called the Gigaplane-XB, also makes it different from the lower-end models from the Ex000 series as these systems use a bus interconnect between processors. The system is built up from system boards each containing up to 4 processors, 2 level-2 caches (<= 4 MB) and 4 memory banks that plug into the Gigaplane crossbar which thus acts as a backplane. The caches are kept coherent by a "snoopy bus" protocol, i.e., each cache is aware of the (in)validation of data by continuous monitoring the data on the backplane and updating their copies accordingly. The Gigaplane crossbar connects to the processors with separate data and address lines which recognises the fact that most data transfers are essentially point-to-point transfers while addresses often have to be broadcasted to many or all processors. The effective aggregate bandwidth for data is 102.4 GB/s with a point-to-point speed of 1.6 GB/s (theoretical peak). The Starfire is a typical SMP machine with provisions for shared-memory parallelism in the Fortran and C(++) compilers by directives in the source code. Sun has joined the OpenMP consortium for standardising the shared-memory programming model. Of course it is possible to cluster E10000s and use such a cluster in a DM-MIMD way. Measured Performances: A speed of 420 Gflop/s is reported for an 8-way cluster of 64 processor machines in solving an order 144,000 linear system. The efficiency for this problem is 59%. |
| System Parameters: |
| Model E10000 Clock cycle 400 MHz Theor. peak performance Per proc. (64-bit) 800 Mflop/s Maximal (64-bit) 51.2 Gflop/s Main memory <= 64 GB Memory bandwidth No. of processors 16-64 |