
Odin: Co-Packaging Next-Gen DC Switches and Accelerators with Silicon Photonics - rbanffy
https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3420/ranovus-odin-co-packaging-next-gen-dc-switches-and-accelerators-with-silicon-photonics/
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marksc
Wired communication at VRAM speeds on a single low (production) cost chip?!
This is going to be game changing for AI and super-computing. Wow.

At these speeds clustering and distributed computing will be a thing of the
past in supercomputing.

The supercomputer of next year may functionally be an enormous symmetric
multiprocessor bottle-necked only by physical space and power.

The same code could be run on a laptop or supercomputer without having to
optimize it. This will make development of large scale applications way more
accessible.

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throwaway_pdp09
There's this thing called the speed of light... And RAM access speed. Probably
more. It'll be more of a step than a revolution I guess.

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rbanffy
Photons are still a lot faster than electrons. Latency at the endpoints is
still a thing, but this allows a lot of 800 Gbps channels along distances
copper can't match.

I don't want to think about the NUMA model for a beast that takes this to its
upper limits.

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sitkack
What is the class of problem that can be solved by computers of a certain size
(compute density metric)? If a computer is basically instantaneous, but has to
communicate over vast distances, it still couldn't solve large problems.

Couldn't we have already made 100k core single image OSs running over RDMA?

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throwaway_pdp09
I don't think @rbanffy is claiming such a class of problems exist. I certainly
didn't read it that way.

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sitkack
@rbanffy might know if they do.

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rbanffy
I'm sure that, as we extend the capabilities of our machines, we'll find new
problems or approaches to known problems that were not practical up until
then.

Like I mentioned, this can increase bandwidth and reduce latency between
system components, making warehouse-sized computers look like container-sized
ones. I bet we can find some use for that.

