Fast Cost-Effective Cluster Interconnect

75307-Many applications, including those in Nuclear Physics research, could take greater advantage of supercomputer power if the connections between commodity systems were faster and cheaper. Current techniques for connecting computers into clusters are limited both by performance and price ¿ slow interconnects limit overall performance and expensive interconnects limit the budget for processing power. This project will demonstrate the technical feasibility and performance of a nearest-neighbor interconnect technology, based on commodity chip hardware and direct memory access software. Phase I will develop the basic commodity chip design and direct memory access software architecture to model the likely application performance. The initial design will target eight serial links at 640 million bits per second to connect to the nearest neighbor nodes. The Phase II goal will be the flexible design of a low cost interface card and requisite software that tracks over time the commodity availability of faster internal computer buses. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: In addition to the Nuclear Physics application, low cost clusters could be made available as server farms for use as on-demand supercomputers for grid computing applications, including biomedical, financial, and mechanical modeling.