A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe

http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/06/02/a-look-inside-the-fastest-supercomputer-in-europe/

by vaksel • 17 years ago

26 17 17 years ago

royal.pingdom.com

khandekars3• 17 years ago

Processor: 32-bit PowerPC 450 at 850 MHz. The supercomputer has 294,912 processor cores. Instead of running it at a higher speed, they are quite correctly exploiting the parallelism. It's a net win for performance and energy efficiency. I guess that the desktops of the future will tend to follow a similar trend.

Retric3• 17 years ago

I can't help but wonder how much you could do with a super computer budget working with these (http://www.amax.com/CS_nVidiaTeslaDetail.asp?cs_id=PSC2) It works out to ~10$ / 1ghz core.

pmjordan3• 17 years ago

The problem with GPUs is that I/O latency is very high compared to your average supercomputer. You can do a crazy amount of computation locally on one card, but for problems that aren't "embarrassingly parallel", i.e. those that require a lot of low-latency inter-node communication, you'll immediately be limited by latency.

If nVidia or AMD release GPU based stream processors with onboard or daughterboard-based interconnects directly accessible from the code running on the GPU, THAT's when they'll start eating into CPU market share.

If you're buying a supercomputer, you'll want to make sure to spend at least 50% on the interconnect or you're in for a big disappointment.

wmf3• 17 years ago

I guess that the desktops of the future will tend to follow a similar trend.

They won't, because desktop software is quite different from HPC software.

khandekars3• 17 years ago

I will like to believe that the Desktop software will move towards parallelism, may not be to the same extent as of HPC, but in a similar direction in the sense that it will certainly go away from strictly single core approach. It won't be easy, e.g. none of the web browsers today fully exploits all cores of a box. But, it will be fun to watch.

Off topic: I'm in your fan club, :) due to your "Hack the planet" blog http://wmf.editthispage.com since Dec. 1999.

gaius3• 17 years ago

Well, yes and no. A games developer will do whatever they can to get realistic fluid simulation, for example. People already use more compute power for fog and smoke in games than was used on the weather 20 years ago...

Remember history. Anything people could do on the "mainframe", they eventually wanted to on the desktop.

A look inside the fastest supercomputer in Europe

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