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>This might be a super dumb question, but are super computers worth it? Yes, because that's where you get innovation in architecture. You have to understand t
by som33 6y ago
>This might be a super dumb question, but are super computers worth it?
Yes, because that's where you get innovation in architecture. You have to understand the reason commodity hardware caught up supercomputers was because of getting lucky with materials. AKA the mateirals cpu's were made out of was easily shrinkable and frequency kept going up because of dennard scaling until roughly 2006. With the end of dennard scaling, research into new processor materials and computer architectures is the main issue. Single threaded performance is a huge priority because most problems we are interested in cannot be made parallel and hence do not benefit much from multicore.
There are also things you are not hearing about and aren't privy too.
Basically computers can run much faster if you use incredibly expensive or experimental materials. The major roadblock is really mass production. I'm certain there are black projects doing all sorts of custom hardware behind the scenes, most likely for military applications.
But the expense to run those custom machines makes it non viable for anything like mass adoption.
- LASR 6y agoIt seems like you believe you know a lot on this subject.
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago> Basically computers can run much faster if you use incredibly expensive or experimental materials. The major roadblock is really mass production. I'm certain there are black projects doing all sorts of custom hardware behind the scenes, most likely for military applications. No. The CPUs on supercomputers are basically the same as what you can purchase commercially. What distinguishes supercomputers from "the cloud" is better networking. > Single threaded performance is a huge priority because most problems we are interested in cannot be made parallel and hence do not benefit much from multicore. The few big problems very interesting to militaries are all embarassingly parallel. There are no super-secret CPUs that have better single-threaded performance than what is available commercially.
- jiggawatts 6y agoThat's not entirely true. Well, it is true that you can't get better chips with much higher clocks commercially, but there are specialist vendors making digital circuitry with crazy high clock speeds, and the primary market is the military. For example, the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic uses superconducting circuitry and experimental chips have hit 1 THz for simple ADC/DAC circuits, and I've heard of 100 GHz DSP chips in practical use. They're typically used for radio telescope amplifiers and digitisers, large static military radar installations, etc... People sometimes forget that the commodity market seeks a kind of Pareto Frontier optimisation where "cost effectiveness" and "low risk manufacturing" are key metrics. If you don't care about any of that and just want the maximum performance at any cost, there's some amazing technologies out there! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_single_flux_quantum
- som33 6y agoYou can be told the facts and the figures and not reason to the right conclusion, see the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ