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What kind of cores do machines of this caliber use? I seem to recall that some years ago they used some Xeons and other "consumer-level" processors, just with
by saganus 8y ago
What kind of cores do machines of this caliber use?
I seem to recall that some years ago they used some Xeons and other "consumer-level" processors, just with special interconnects and maybe even using special versions, but they seemed like pretty close cousins to the regular processors of a desktop.
Is this still the case? I see in the Top500 list that the Sunway TaihuLight uses the Sunway SW26010 260C processors.
Are they fundamentally different than consumer-level processors? any special architectures or other interesting parts? or are they pretty similar, just built for massive interconnection and such?
- monocasa 8y agoMost of the time they care more about perf/watt than raw power. The problems that run on these have to be so embarrassingly parallel that individual node perf isn't that important. Sometimes those two line up well, but not always. For instance Blue Gene used more or less off the shelf PowerPC 4xx cores that were designed for embedded use cases. The neat stuff tends to be in the supporting chipset, particularly around the interconnect. In this case it's using more or less off the shelf POWER9s and Nvidia GPUs.