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I think you are on to something insofar as noticing that supercomputing vs. cluster computing is a spectrum. You could imagine starting with cluster computing a
by whatshisface 5y ago
I think you are on to something insofar as noticing that supercomputing vs. cluster computing is a spectrum. You could imagine starting with cluster computing at zero hardware support, and slowly adding more hardware interconnects and putting more work into topology, as you climb towards the platonic ideal supercomputer which, fitting its name, would simply be one super computer.
- remram 5y agoI don't know if manufacturers are going up the ladder though. Even desktop computers are looking more and more like independent interconnected cores (eg NUMA and GPUs). Even in software, compute-heavy workloads tend to be written that way regardless, to sidestep locking issues. I just don't think people would want to address random parts of memory even if a hypothetical exabyte memory hardware allowed it.
- whatshisface 5y agoGPU cores address a unified memory with many ALUs. That's supercomputer-y architecture.
- remram 5y agoWhat I meant is that CPU and GPU are separate, and the GPU cannot access all the memory.