ATOLL Milestones Reached, 18th Feb 2002

We are pleased to announce the achievement of some significant milestones. First of all, we finally managed to tapeout the ATOLL ASIC. The layout has been sent last week to UMC, Taiwan for participation in one of their Silicon Shuttle runs. It will take now 10 weeks until we will receive about 30 prototype chips. To our best knowledge, the ATOLL chip is the most complex and fastest ASIC ever done by a European university. Here is a photo of a layout plot.

Another goal was attained by fabricating a prototype of the PCI-X card. It is used to test various electrical parameters. Here is a shot of the card with one of the two connectors mounted.

And we also have a first version of the ATOLL software (low-level API, MPI layer, monitor/debug daemons, etc.) up and running. The ATOLL NIC is emulated by a separate process. We ran several MPI applications on Linux and Solaris with success. You can look at a screenshot of the performance visualization GUI here.

We expect to have the first ATOLL prototype cluster up and running this summer.

The ATOLL team