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> There are no "strong oxen" in today's world Some problems demand shared-memory architectures. The fact that those who work on such problems lack the funding
by asciilifeform 17y ago
> There are no "strong oxen" in today's world
Some problems demand shared-memory architectures. The fact that those who work on such problems lack the funding to support a large market in shared-memory machines does not negate the problems' existence.
- wmf 17y agoI assume that Cray was talking about a uniprocessor, not SMP. Besides, it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster against EC2's shared-nothing cluster.
- asciilifeform 17y ago> it's irrelevant to this article which was comparing NCSA's shared-nothing cluster... I merely object to the modern redefinition of the word "supercomputer" to mean a warehouse full of cheap PCs. There once were actual supercomputers.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- sp332 17y agoCray didn't make uniprocessors. The reason his supercomputers were faster (and why Cray Computer Corporation is still a darn good supercomputer company) were advances in moving data among lots of processors.
- jacquesm 17y agoHe wasn't but that's beside the point. There is a -limited- market for 'real' supercomputers, and with that I mean computers that have been geared towards a special class of problems. They too exist in SMP versions, but it would be a serious mistake to think of the individual machines in those arrays as comparable to a machine in a run-of-the-mill beowulf arrangement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SX-9 The reason these machines still have a right to an existence is because not all problems are solvable in a massively parallel fashion. Some parallelization may be possible, but the speed up from such rearranging of the problem has an upper limit. That's where these machines come in to their own.