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Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

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Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#161

Probably shouldn't reveal this but, Google are using it internally for their accelerated networking in their cloud, pretty much all Lanai hardware is deployed in GCP infrastructure.

You should not have posted this, least of all because it's extraordinarily misleading.

We use Lanai elsewhere, and it's in hardware powering Google's server networking networking (inclusive of GCP), but Lanai sadly does not play a substantial role in Andromeda networking.

Feel free to ping me on corp (username in my profile here) to discuss.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#162
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this generally the case? If so, I had no idea...

Generally different jurisdictions have different rules, but in California it is the case. And to another point made here, if you're employer is going to deduct some of your paycheck to pay premiums month to month then it can be a net loss if you won't use it enough to offset what you would have been paid.

Thanks - I need to do some research on this!

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line in that post is mystifying: they peddled Infiniband, an inferior design based on bus technology, but repositioned as a point to point network

At least initially (~2005 or so?) we had customers who were given free IB for their HPC clusters ripping the IB out and replacing it with with paid Myrinet installations because they could never get their IB clusters to work reliably. Although we had the superior product, we could not market our way out of a wet paper bag. Our CEO counted on our (then) superior engineering & expected our products to market themselves…

I build a myrinet HPC cluster or two, vague memory that it was 2.5Gbit. Worked well, I particularly liked the cables (thin and optical, way nicer than IB cables). When I went to replace them the Myrinet 10G was repeatedly delayed, and seemed to be focusing on 10G ethernet, not MPI/HPC.

We ended up going with a new upstart called Pathscale, which then was bought by qlogic, and then Intel. Our benchmarks showed a clear win over Mellanox at the time. In particular on larger jobs the Mellanox drivers seemed to consume a fair bit of ram for each client you were talking to, so even 32 nodes jobs would consume a fair bit of ram. We even built a cluster out of hypertransport connected infinipath cards in a "HTX" slow instead of PCIe. Managed I believe 1.4us latency, which is still reasonably competitive today. We built SDR (first public cluster), DDR (first public cluster), QDR based clusters. But then Intel said the new Infinipath would not be supported on AMD nodes, or even previous gen Intel nodes, I said it's a non starter and switched to Mellanox. I talked to several other HPC sites that said the same thing, months later Intel killed off the product. Sad and short sited on Intel's part.

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