Profile on Sun’s proximity interconnect

via Sun’s HPC Watercooler

Profile on Sedna, Sun’s proximity interconnect, and the man behind the implementation, Hans Eberle. You may recall that the Big Idea behind Sedna is to transfer data between chips without using wires. Eberle is already reporting results of I/O bandwidth two orders of magnitude higher than by conventional methods.

Instead of using a complex, multi-stage, hierarchical design where you actually have to schedule the path through the various switching elements, requiring a fantastic degree of coordination, the new design is a simple, single-stage switch.

“With Proximity Communication we’re getting something like two orders of magnitude more I/O bandwidth. What that means is we don’t have to make use of hierarchical topologies. We basically can look at this as a flat switch,” Eberle says.

Read the whole thing here.