"Sun Microsystems is researching ways to make massive supercomputers even faster, including wireless connections between CPU and memory," writes Patrizio with internetnews.com

One of Sun's solutions includes the Proximity Communications project, which is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project, "the same Defense Department group that gave us the Internet."

"Proximity Communication will allow a CPU to communicate with memory without using the multiple layers of copper wires in the motherboard that run between the CPU and memory sockets. Instead, a pair of metal plates that don't quite touch will send and receive the signal back and forth."

"Sun expects to make a major presentation on its Proximity Communications milestones at the Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) in May 2009 in San Diego. Bjorn Andersson, marketing director of high performance computing products at Sun, said it will still be a few years before Proximity Communication is viable, but it will shave off quite a bit of latency.

'We can't eliminate latency completely but it's one or two orders of magnitude,' he told InternetNews.com. 'Latency is the charge to send data over the wire to communicate. Proximity Communication avoids that completely. It comes down to light speed if you do it that way.'"

Excerpts from Article

• A potential game changer

"'If Sun can get this to work, it could be very game-changing, said semiconductor analyst Nathan Brookwood. 'The reason I say that is if you look at a processor today, typically those chips have half of their area devoted to logic and the other half devoted to caches,' he said."

• Why the technology has a lot of promise

"Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds also thinks the technology has a lot of promise. 'The key to proximity is these connections are short and dense. That takes away a lot of support stuff, so the size of a server can come down. This can make servers significantly smaller and allow for an increase in density in the datacenter,' added Martin Reynolds, vice president and fellow with Gartner."

• Thirty year-old algorithms

"'If you look at the core problem, it really is on the software side,' he [Martin Reynolds] said. 'There are many ways you improve different algorithms to solve the problems. To really take advantage of the performance you can get out of a multi-core system, you need to change the algorithms. Some might be 30 years old.'

To address this, Sun is coming up with tools to help customers parallelize their apps, including a new high level language being developed with DARPA that allows a developer to write their app without having to do any of the parallelism, and when the application is compiled, it is automatically parallelized."

More Information

Sun\'s Unwired Motherboard Plans

R&D 100 Award: Proximity Communication

Proximity Communication: A Primer by Many Hands

Sun Blade X6240 Server Modules and Options with Enhanced Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processors

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