4 ms·

These kinds of efforts were always doomed by Moore's law. Why build them if you can wait 5 years and then build something of equivalent power with commodity har

• mechagodzilla 10y ago
  I think the Anton machines for simulating molecular dynamics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)) show that this has already changed. The 8 year old Anton 1 machines are still ~1-2 orders of magnitude faster than commodity clusters, and the now 3 year old Anton 2 is another order of magnitude faster still.
  • stcredzero 10y ago
    The way an ALU or CUDA core gets its data to operate on and where that data goes and the latency involved are the big deal for large computational tasks now. Specialized ASICs also can give a huge advantage. With specialization, you can eliminate overhead. People keep talking about reconfigurable arrays of hardware as well.
• convolvatron 10y ago
  sure, its a time game. but I remember a 60GF (maybe it was 30?) result on the CM-2 in the early nineties. I think that machine was $40M, give or take. Lets also pretend that it was 10 years before we could have done the same runs on a commodity machine. You can imagine that for things of sufficient importance, there is an arguable cost utility. Of course that one machine ran quite a number of codes 24/7 But there is a second order effect, maybe a lot of that cultural history was lost before SIMD really caught on, but in general I think we gain quite a bit of collective experience by pushing the state of the art. OTOH, maybe since games ended up driving the development, and HPC ended up trying to adapt their workloads to those platforms, you could argue that it was wasted effort. But to echo my earlier comment, programming models to easily exploit substantial concurrencies is where the real sugar is.
• ghaff 10y ago
  That certainly became true. I'm not sure it was especially true in the timeframe that we're talking about here. By the mid-eighties we were heading toward more standardized SMP designs but there were still a lot of exotic architectures out there--and it would be close to another decade before volume processors really became the norm in midrange to high-end servers.
• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Moore's Law itself was the result of HW engineers, fabs, chemists, and so on doing the same thing. You'd see professionals in the field thinking a certain thing was impossible with existing tech. The textbooks would even describe certain limits or practices. The person and text would be proven wrong within about a year, with new texts written, thanks to sheer volume of PhD's, cutting-edge equipment, and money thrown at the problem. It's truly an exceptional situation. Far as Thinking Machines comment, I answered that one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282148 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282148
• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Actually, I just remembered an example in your domain: Cavium Octeon II and III for networked applications. SDR, firewalls, VPN's, etc combine general-purpose algorithms with specific ones easy to accelerate in hardware. Also doesnt take what's in Intel/AMD CPU's that have tk run huge range of workloads. So, Cavium started with 16 MIPS-ISA cores, added TCP/IP offloading, encryption engine, compression engine, and so on. A PCI card on 45+nm could handle multi-Gbps processing with 15 cores idle. My Core Duo 2 isn't going to pull that off. Their 28-nm has 48 cores and "hundreds of accelerators" to pick. Heteroginity is not just future: it's the present in many markets. Another example is the Automata processor that similarly represents protocols in an ideal way. Check it out. Crazy efficient in a way you can only do with atypical, hardware-level thinking. Not to mention entire FPGA ecosystem that accelerates algorithms faster than Moore's Law systems while their own hardware is less efficient & cost more. :)
• gaius 10y ago
  Because if everyone sat and waited for someone else to do it, no one ever would. Lots of the features we take for granted in commodity tech originated in something exotic.
• biot 10y ago
  Why build a quad core CPU when you can just wait a few years and a single core CPU will be just as fast?
  • quonn 10y ago
    A quad-core CPU is worth building, because it is general-purpose, not application-specific. Note that the story already changes with - say - 16-core CPUs. Those are not useful for many users so they are not as common.
    • biot 10y ago
      It seems to me that the Connection Machine is somewhat analogous to massive-core GPUs, and that with the right tooling one could use it for general purpose apps.
      • analognoise 10y ago
        You can hammer a nail with a wrench, but that doesn't mean it's the right tool.
• snaky 10y ago
  Mellanox recently bought Tilera multi-core IP for 831 mln. Maybe they don't want to wait 5 (or 50?) years, and their customers too? > The BlueField family of SoC devices integrates an array of 64-bit ARMv8 A72 cores interconnected by a coherent mesh network Looks like modern Connection Machine, right?
  • kijiki 10y ago
    Not really, the Tilera chips are MIMD with a coherent shared memory. The CM was a SIMD, and each processor has its own independent memory. A Sun workstation submitted the (single) stream of instructions to the array of processors. Having a 64K wide SIMD seems completely nuts, though since the processors are single bit, so if you're dealing with 64 bit values, that is "only" 1024-way SIMD. Which is still pretty nuts.
    • chris_st 10y ago
      The CM-2 didn't work that way. If you declared a 64-bit value, it went "down" each processor's memory, so that it would still be 64K values. Interestingly, you could ask the machine to consider itself as having twice the CPUs (each with half the memory) and so have 128k, 256k, etc. processors. Ah, come to think about it, if you had the floating-point accelerator chips, you could program it "slice-wise", which was kind of what you're talking about. Our CM-2 didn't have them, so I never did it, so... ask someone else :-)