4 ms·

I stopped being impressed by supercomputers like 5 years ago. These days it's all about money. You can buy as many CPUs/RAM, and connect them together. I'm muc

by rorrr 15y ago

I stopped being impressed by supercomputers like 5 years ago. These days it's all about money. You can buy as many CPUs/RAM, and connect them together. I'm much more impressed by the advances in CPU architecture. SSDs have been amazing so far. Networking has been improving too.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
Actually that's not exactly true, since Linpack doesn't really lend itself to architecture's like say, Google's, where you have lots of machines sitting on the network. The bandwidth between the nodes, and its latency becomes the determining factor. So for these guys it is all about the interconnect rather than just how many CPUs you can put in a rack.
cabacon 15y ago
What impressed you about the supercomputers of 5 years ago that no longer impresses you about today's supercomputers? The Cray approach (http://www.nccs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/UserMeeting2011.pdf http://www.nccs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/UserMeeting20...) and the IBM approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FQ) both seem more interesting than just connecting together as many CPUs/RAM as you can afford. There are interesting OS challenges for the compute nodes, interesting hardware challenges on interconnect, interesting filesystem challenges, interesting programming challenges to manage the parallelism, competing architectural approaches between CPUs and GPU-accelerated clusters ... it's a pretty interesting space!
coldarchon 15y ago
The worst part were the announcements they had reached the power of our human brain. For my diploma I have read books of vonNeuman and calculated the assumptions he made. According to this we need a computer who can make 200 quadrillion calculations, if we ignore the clock rate of the brain of 40Hz, the 20 different hormones and glial cells, which no one knows what they do except they somehow support neurons ..

by rorrr 15y ago

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Actually that's not exactly true, since Linpack doesn't really lend itself to architecture's like say, Google's, where you have lots of machines sitting on the network. The bandwidth between the nodes, and its latency becomes the determining factor. So for these guys it is all about the interconnect rather than just how many CPUs you can put in a rack.

cabacon 15y ago

What impressed you about the supercomputers of 5 years ago that no longer impresses you about today's supercomputers? The Cray approach (http://www.nccs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/UserMeeting2011.pdf http://www.nccs.gov/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/UserMeeting20...) and the IBM approach (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FQ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene#Blue_Gene.2FQ) both seem more interesting than just connecting together as many CPUs/RAM as you can afford. There are interesting OS challenges for the compute nodes, interesting hardware challenges on interconnect, interesting filesystem challenges, interesting programming challenges to manage the parallelism, competing architectural approaches between CPUs and GPU-accelerated clusters ... it's a pretty interesting space!

coldarchon 15y ago

The worst part were the announcements they had reached the power of our human brain. For my diploma I have read books of vonNeuman and calculated the assumptions he made. According to this we need a computer who can make 200 quadrillion calculations, if we ignore the clock rate of the brain of 40Hz, the 20 different hormones and glial cells, which no one knows what they do except they somehow support neurons ..