But not with 6-channels per socket (48-channels total across an 8-socket computer). That's a heck of a lot of bandwidth.
I was doing the specs from memory and conservatively: 128GB sticks across 48-channels.
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-70...
This 8-way Supermicro system supports 192x DIMMs. So... 128GB sticks x 192 == 24TBs of RAM or so, maybe 48TBs.
> At a certain point, you're better off investing in making your application work on an accelerator of some kind, in the form of a GPU or an FPGA or task-specific ASIC, rather than giving Intel all your money in the hopes of eeking out a marginal performance improvement. Alternatively, finding software that can scale to more than one machine.
I mean, these 8-way systems are what? $500k ? Less than $1MM for sure. How many engineers do you need before a machine of that price is reasonable?
Really, not that many. If you can solve a problem with a team of 10 engineers + 48 TBs of RAM, that's probably cheaper than trying to solve the same problem with 30 engineers with a cheaper computer.
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> An 8-socket system is going to consume an enormous amount of power, cost an unbelievable amount of money, and the complex NUMA domain combined with Intel's interconnect isn't going to "just work" for almost any software, so you're likely going to put a lot of effort into making that system barely work.
NUMA scales better than RDMA / Ethernet / Infiniband. A lot, lot, LOT better.
All communications are just memory-reads, and that's a real memory read. Not an "emulated memory read transmitted over Ethernet / RDMA pretending to be a memory read". You incur the NUMA penalty but that's almost certainly better than incurring a PCIe penalty.
I was doing the specs from memory and conservatively: 128GB sticks across 48-channels.
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/7U/7088/SYS-70...
This 8-way Supermicro system supports 192x DIMMs. So... 128GB sticks x 192 == 24TBs of RAM or so, maybe 48TBs.
> At a certain point, you're better off investing in making your application work on an accelerator of some kind, in the form of a GPU or an FPGA or task-specific ASIC, rather than giving Intel all your money in the hopes of eeking out a marginal performance improvement. Alternatively, finding software that can scale to more than one machine.
I mean, these 8-way systems are what? $500k ? Less than $1MM for sure. How many engineers do you need before a machine of that price is reasonable?
Really, not that many. If you can solve a problem with a team of 10 engineers + 48 TBs of RAM, that's probably cheaper than trying to solve the same problem with 30 engineers with a cheaper computer.
-----------
> An 8-socket system is going to consume an enormous amount of power, cost an unbelievable amount of money, and the complex NUMA domain combined with Intel's interconnect isn't going to "just work" for almost any software, so you're likely going to put a lot of effort into making that system barely work.
NUMA scales better than RDMA / Ethernet / Infiniband. A lot, lot, LOT better.
All communications are just memory-reads, and that's a real memory read. Not an "emulated memory read transmitted over Ethernet / RDMA pretending to be a memory read". You incur the NUMA penalty but that's almost certainly better than incurring a PCIe penalty.