Re: [TCLUG:21592] Pentium Pro's

[Ryan Hankins <rhankins@d.umn.edu>]

* Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom <chrome@real-time.com> [000925 21:44]:
> > IBM's Sequent servers are NUMA machines, not SMP.  (That's
> > why they bought Sequent - for the NUMA tech.)
> 
> As I understood it, NUMA is just one SMP architecture (among others,like
> ccNUMA, or COMA). it uses a number of identical processors, so shouldn't it
> still be called Symmetric Multi-Processing? (as opposed to Asymmetric
> Multi-Processing).

NUMA = non-uniform memory architecture.  That means, greatly simplified,
that each node may have different access times to memory depending on
whether the memory is on the same node as the processor.  This is in
contrast to SMP where all processors have all memory at the same access
speeds.

ccNUMA stands for cache coherent: all the caches are kept consistent
between processors; it's just another type of NUMA that scales well to
lots of procs.

-Ryan

-- 
-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^
Ryan Hankins                                     rhankins@d.umn.edu
University of Minnesota, Duluth
-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^
Comparing information and knowledge is like asking whether the fatness
of a pig is more or less green than the designated hitter rule."
		-- David Guaspari
-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^-^