Comments on: Intel Goes Barefoot As It Leaves The Omni-Path https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/01/intel-goes-barefoot-as-it-leaves-the-omni-path/ In-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds. Thu, 08 Aug 2019 18:58:30 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 By: Ben Smith https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/01/intel-goes-barefoot-as-it-leaves-the-omni-path/#comment-120099 Sat, 03 Aug 2019 20:59:21 +0000 http://www.nextplatform.com/?p=40225#comment-120099 You can take a look on the economics. What is the $ portion of the network from the entire system? 10%? 15%? and what is the $ portion of the CPUs? 50%? if offloading gets you 20%, or 30% more CPU cycles, you should pay extra for offloading and it will be more economics for your datacenter. It is not the flops you buy, it is the flops you really get.

]]> By: Johannes https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/01/intel-goes-barefoot-as-it-leaves-the-omni-path/#comment-120094 Sat, 03 Aug 2019 18:11:23 +0000 http://www.nextplatform.com/?p=40225#comment-120094 In reply to Anonymous Coward.

It’s not even an economics debate. InfiniBand has full hardware offload and is cheaper than both Ethernet and InfiniBand at the same speeds.

]]> By: Johannes https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/01/intel-goes-barefoot-as-it-leaves-the-omni-path/#comment-120089 Sat, 03 Aug 2019 17:16:00 +0000 http://www.nextplatform.com/?p=40225#comment-120089 In reply to Bill B.

What would have been your reason for standardising on OmniPath? It’s just InfiniBand plus a few minor features but minus Hardware Offload. That would be okay for use cases like databases etc. where Ethernet is not good enough, but I would never go without Hardware Offload for HPC nodes. OmniPath is not even cheaper than InfiniBand.

]]> By: Anonymous Coward https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/01/intel-goes-barefoot-as-it-leaves-the-omni-path/#comment-120043 Fri, 02 Aug 2019 11:20:39 +0000 http://www.nextplatform.com/?p=40225#comment-120043 The onload/offload debate is almost as old as computing because it’s an economics and/or efficiency debate. If you care more about performance than price, then offloading work to hardware accelerators will probably be appealing. If you care more about upfront price than performance, then onloading will be appealing. Finally, the onload/offload tradeoff can change over time because not all hardware technologies are improving at the same rate.

]]> By: Bill B https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/01/intel-goes-barefoot-as-it-leaves-the-omni-path/#comment-120024 Thu, 01 Aug 2019 19:27:37 +0000 http://www.nextplatform.com/?p=40225#comment-120024 I was excited about Omnipath and was looking to standardize on Omnipath for current generation (Eypc and Scalable Xeon) HPC nodes. Then I learned that not only would Intel not support AMD chips, but they wouldn’t even support previous generation Intel chips. Who wants an interconnected that’s tied to a particular vendors CPUs of a particular generation? I talked to a few other HPC sites and they had the same concerns.

Intel doesn’t seem to realize that an interconnect is a long term investment that needs to work with all equipment you might buy over the next 5 years.

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