* Myricom's tech demo; Peripheral's portable air conditioning unit
It’s slow out here in server land this week, now that Sun has made its Opteron-based server announcements. About all that has crossed the ticker is news of a technology demonstration from cluster interconnect vendor Myricom and a portable air conditioning unit from Peripheral Manufacturing.
Myricom recently briefed me on a new message-passing software for its Myri-10G products that decreases latency by five to 10 times that of conventional 10 Gigabit Ethernet over TCP/IP.
The company’s Myrinet Express (MX) software, which is used with Myri-10G adapters and standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches to interconnect servers and workstations, can now achieve 2.4 microseconds of latency at the application level and 1.2Gbyte/sec throughput, according to the company’s claims. This performance is nearly equal to the latency achieved using the MX over Myrinet protocol.
This achievement is important because it extends high-performance computing beyond clusters and grids into enterprise networks that already employ standard Ethernet switching.
The MX/Ethernet technology is transparent to Ethernet switches. MX/Ethernet provides host-CPU utilization in a range below 1%.
When Myricom introduced its Myri-10G products last summer, it made way for latency decreases over Ethernet. The company’s Myri-10G network adapters run both Myrinet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet protocols.
Myricom will make MX/Ethernet available to OEMs and cluster integrators. In May, Myricom said its 10Gbps Ethernet gear is being used to interconnect supercomputer clusters into a distributed cluster located at four Dutch universities.
In other news, Peripheral Manufacturing announced the PER-12000A – a portable air conditioner and dehumidifier – for cooling hot spots in computer rooms.
The PER-12000A has three speeds and constant temperature control. It features an automatic restart function, and a backup reserve pump so excess water won’t overflow if the primary pump fails. The portable air conditioner has a cooling capacity of 12,000 BTUs.
The PER-12000A competes with portable air conditioning units from Movin Cool, which makes units ranging from 7,000 to 60,000 BTUs. The PER-12000A costs $1,250.
