[Missed this one last week in Europe] We made a big splash earlier this summer at the High-Performance Computing show in Dresden; a concerted attempt to grab a bigger piece of the HPC market. I thought the coverage was pretty intelligent: the big deal about Constellation isn’t the blades or the disks, it’s the big switch. Anyone can stuff a bunch of racks with blades with hot chips on ’em; the hard part is getting them to work together, and whatever the approach, it’s easy to get bottlenecked on the messaging. The big new 3,456-way Infiniband switch is a brute-force assault on the problem, combining silicon, bus-ware, connector, and cabling wizardry: Josh Simons has close-ups and unveiling shots, but Jonathan has the best pictures. Why is this interesting? Josh has the numbers: 19% of the worldwide server market.
