Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ames!amelia!serafini From: serafini@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (David B. Serafini) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: MYRIAS - yet again Keywords: mimd myrias Message-ID: <4218@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> Date: 14 Dec 89 06:04:24 GMT References: <13683@reed.UUCP> <515@ctycal.UUCP> Reply-To: serafini@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (David B. Serafini) Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA Lines: 38 In article <515@ctycal.UUCP> ingoldsb@ctycal.UUCP (Terry Ingoldsby) writes: >In article <13683@reed.UUCP>, mdr@reed.UUCP (Mike Rutenberg) writes: >> Does anyone have *any* details of the architecture that they can talk about? > >Myrias is based in Edmonton Alberta. They are real, and have a real >(as in working) multiprocessor machine. I believe the machine uses >68030 processors. >-- > Terry Ingoldsby ctycal!ingoldsb@calgary.UUCP > Land Information Systems or > The City of Calgary ...{alberta,ubc-cs,utai}!calgary!ctycal!ingoldsb The processors are 68020's. They are going to 88000 and hope to ship mid '90. The machine is hierarchical. There are 4 processors on a board, with a full interconnect between these. There are 16 boards in a card cage. There are two busses that interconnect the boards. Any board can use either bus. There are 5 serial com lines coming out of each cage, so they can be inter- connected. I think they've built a 512 proc. machine, but I might be wrong. I believe the com lines are FDDI using the AMD chip set. The number of lines is determined by how many chips fit on a board. It's a real machine. They've sold some. The software is more important than the hardware since they're trying to build a programming paradigm that will be both easy to use and easy to port. They claim that converting old code takes hours or days instead of months. Basically anything that can be vectorized on a Cray can be parallelized on the Myrias. They downplay the issues of interconnect performance (latency and bandwidth) more than they should (IMHO), but for some applications it has great potential for scalability. Like the i860 Intel iSPC, the 88000 Myrias will have performance like a full-up Y-MP, if you can get at it. David B. Serafini serafini@ralph.arc.nasa.gov Rose Engineering and Research @NASA/Ames Research Center MS 227-6 Moffett Field, CA 94035