Moore’s Law has ruled the development of computers for over 50 years (actually i

Question

Moore’s Law has ruled the development of computers for over 50 years (actually it has been officially tracked starting 1958).

The trend is evident in High Performance Computing (HPC) field as shown in this diagram on the right from Top500 website.

Notice that in the period depicted in the diagram from 1994 to 2016, there had been dramatic changes in system architecture of super computers. Hardware evolved from vector computers to Massively Parallel Computing to Clusters and now accelerators. In the mean time, parallel computing tools shifted from PVM to MPI and OpenMP. Popular interconnections changed a few times between propriety connectors and fast switches. This diagram is a vivid testimony that Moore’s Law is followed through a combined efforts of many things together   

Top500 website contains a wealth of statistics on these fast computer systems. Browse the website then answer Questions 1-3 using your knowledge in operating systems (Question 4 requires further reading of extra materials).

4) Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) enables efficient memory access from one computer to another. Read about it using Google Scholar, ACM Digital Library or any professional literature tools. Write a 150-200 words (references extra) review on RDMA’s applications and potentials in HPC. Find relevant information in cutting edge research and cite them (minimum 5) properly in IEEE/CS format.

Explanation / Answer

4. Remote direct memory access (RDMA) is a direct memory access from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one's operating system. This permits high-throughput, low-latency networking, which is especially useful in massively parallel computer clusters.

Much like other high-performance computing (HPC) interconnects, as of 2013 RDMA has achieved limited acceptance due to the need to install a different networking infrastructure. However, new standards such as iWARP enable Ethernet RDMA implementation at the physical layer using TCP/IP as the transport, combining the performance and latency advantages of RDMA with a low-cost, standards-based solution.The RDMA Consortium and the DAT Collaborative have played key roles in the development of RDMA protocols and APIs for consideration by standards groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Interconnect Software Consortium.

Hardware vendors have started working on higher-capacity RDMA-based network adapters, with rates of 40 Gbit/s reported. Software vendors, such as Red Hat and Oracle Corporation, support these APIs in their latest products and as of 2013 engineers have started developing network adapters that implement RDMA over Ethernet.Both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise MRG have support for RDMA. Microsoft supports RDMA in Windows Server 2012 via SMB Direct.Common RDMA implementations include the Virtual Interface Architecture, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), InfiniBand, and iWARP.

High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly. The term applies especially to systems that function above a teraflop or 1012 floating-point operations per second. The term HPC is occasionally used as a synonym for supercomputing, although technically a supercomputer is a system that performs at or near the currently highest operational rate for computers. Some supercomputers work at more than a petaflop or 1015 floating-point operations per second.The most common users of HPC systems are scientific researchers, engineers and academic institutions. Some government agencies, particularly the military, also rely on HPC for complex applications. High-performance systems often use custom-made components in addition to so-called commodity components. As demand for processing power and speed grows, HPC will likely interest businesses of all sizes, particularly for transaction processing and data warehouses. An occasional techno-fiends might use an HPC system to satisfy an exceptional desire for advanced technology

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