TOPOLOGY

An APEmille machine is a 3D grid of processing nodes with hardware data links between the 3D first neighbouring nodes. The smallest machine is the single Processing Board (PB) where are placed 8 processing nodes with a 2x2x2 topology, (cube). Arranging togheter more PBs it's possible to have more complicated, greater and faster machines.

• Hierarchical Hardware Topology
• Performances
  

 Hierarchical Hardware Topology

The yellow cubes in this rappresentation are single APEmille boards with their 8 processing nodes supposed as placed at the vertices of the cube.

• Board: 8 Nodes (2*2*2 topology)
  
     
  
• SubCrate: 4 Boards (2*2*8 topology)
  
  
  
• Crate: 4 SubCrates -16 Boards (2*8*8 topology)
  
  
  
• Tower: 4 Crates - 64 Boards (8*8*8)
• APEMille: 4 Towers - 256 Boards(32*8*8)

 Performances

The following table reports the performance of the different configuration of an APEmille system: the maximum performance are about 1TeraFlops for the 66 MHz machine, and could be 1.6TFlops in a future 100 MHz release.

Comparing these performances, with an APE100 machine we find out that it's possible to replace an entire APE100 tower (25 GigaFloaps) with a APEmille SubCrate.

Processing node:

• 528 MegaFlops (66 MHz release)
• 800 MegaFlops (100 MHz release)

Board (8 nodes, 2*2*2):

• 4.2 GigaFlops (66 Mhz)
• 6.4 GigaFlops(100 Mhz)

SubCrate (4 Boards, 2*2*8):

• 16.8 GigaFlops (66 Mhz)
• 25.6 GigaFlops(100 Mhz)

Crate (16 Boards, 2*8*8, ~ 0.5 m^3):

• 66 GigaFlops (66 Mhz)
• 100 GigaFlops(100 Mhz)

Tower (4 Crates, 8*8*8, ~ 2 m^3):

• 264 GigaFlops (66 Mhz)
• 400 GigaFlops(100 Mhz)

APEMille (4 Towers, 32*8*8, ~ 8 m^3):

• 1 TeraFlops(66 Mhz)
• 1.6 TeraFlops(100Mhz)