Porting effort towards TILERA massive multicore CPUs...?

[Paketix]

On Sep 26, 2010, at 20:05, Garrett Cooper wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 4:13 AM, Paketix <paketix at bluewin.ch> wrote:
>> there is a rather new processor from TILERA (100 core chip) which is
>> most certainly already known here at FreeBSD mailing list.
>> [http://www.tilera.com/products/processors/TILE-Gx_Family]
>> the processor/platform is targeted towards:
>> - high performance network security platforms
>>  - firewalling/vpn
>>  - utm
>>  - l7 deep packet inspection
>>  - network monitoring and forensics
>> - cloud computing
>>  - web application (lamp)
>>  - data caching (memcached)
>>  - database applications
>>  - high-performance computing
>> 
>> chris metcalf from TILERA did the current linux port and i was in
>> contact with him about two weeks ago.
>> at this time QUANTA computer is starting to offer a 512 core 2U box
>> with an impressive performance/watt ratio (400 watts only for 512
>> cores).
>> [http://www.tilera.com/solutions/cloud_computing]
>> 
>> i guess those massive multicore chips would enable bleeding edge
>> high performance solutions based on FreeBSD.
>> 
>> well...
>> - anyone interested in porting FreeBSD towards TILERA?
>>  (architecture seems to be similar to MIPS...)
>> - is there already some ongoing porting effort?
>> - porting for this chip already discussed in this mailing list?
>> 
>> many thx
>> /pat
>> 
>> some links for those who want some more details:
>> company homepage:
>> http://www.tilera.com/
>> 64core processor:
>> http://www.tilera.com/products/processors/TILEPRO64
>> 100core processor with hardware packet (pre)processing
>> http://www.tilera.com/products/processors/TILE-Gx_Family
>> sample architecture for network appliances:
>> http://www.tilera.com/solutions/networking/network_security_appliances
>> 512core system from QUANTA computer inc. (available Q4-10/Q1-11):
>> http://www.tilera.com/solutions/cloud_computing
>> development system from TILERA:
>> http://www.tilera.com/products/platforms/TILEmpower_platform
> 
>    In short this work requires changes to the scheduler and kernel
> structures that aren't 100% done yet. Look for some of Robert Watson
> and John Baldwin's replies to "Bumping MAXCPU on amd64" thread in the
> past month to freebsd-arch and freebsd-current.
> Cheers,
> -Garrett

usually it would - yes
but maybe not on tilera if you use it for security applications (like firewalling, proxy, url filter, ...)
each tile of a tilera chip chan run its own full featured OS
starting with TileGX the chip has a hardware loadbalancer serving the packet streams to the cores...
this could maybe serve as a first step
full SMP for e.g. database applications etc. later on
btw: the tilera chip does not have a floating point unit anyway which will limit the range of applications (FP must be emulated in software)
BR
/pat