For applications that can be recompiled, however, this intelligent memory, with its hundreds of simple processors, appears as a superb accelerator of applications. Energy consumption presents another challenge. Many processors on a chip, all possibly accessing on-chip memory, consume significant energy. Bob Malone Abstract Times N Systems, a systems company in Austin Texas, has a unique interconnect strategy. Multiple Intel nodes are connected via a large Shared Memory using fiber optics, the hardware runs either W2K or Linux.
Individual nodes can access shared memory by directly addressing data off their local memory.
This collection of hardware, nodes and interconnect is refer to as a team. These improvements will be shipped the end of this year. MPI has been optimized to use the SMN for both message passing and synchronization. Disks can be allocated as SMD Disks and striped across all processors in the team. Additionally TNS has ported gfs a Linux global file system to the TNS Team.