FIG. 1 illustrates an embodiment of a computer system. System 100 is also referred to herein as a “software defined server,” an “enterprise supercomputer,” and a “mainframe.” In the example shown, system 100 includes a plurality of nodes (e.g., nodes 102-108) located in close proximity (e.g., located within the same rack or nearby racks of servers). In other embodiments, multiple racks of nodes (e.g., located within the same facility) can be used in the system. Further, the techniques described herein can also be used in conjunction with distributed systems.
The nodes are interconnected with an interconnect (110) such as 10-gigabit or 40-gigabit Ethernet, direct PCI-to-PCI, and/or InfiniBand. Each node comprises commodity server-class hardware components (e.g., a blade in a rack with its attached or contained peripherals). The interconnect may be dedicated, but need not be. The interconnect may also be high-speed, but need not be. In the example shown in FIG. 1, each node includes multiple physical processor chips. Each physical processor chip (also referred to as a “socket”) includes multiple cores, and each core has multiple hyperthreads.
As illustrated in FIG. 2, the physical structure of system 100 forms a hierarchy (230) (from the bottom) of hyperthreads (232), cores (210-224), physical processor chips (202-208), and nodes (102-108 (with nodes 104, 106, etc. omitted from the figure and represented as ellipses)). The tree depicted in FIG. 2 is of a fixed size, defined by the hardware configuration.
