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Frankly I Don't See Either Side As the Future...Frankly I Don't See Either Side As the Future...Posted Oct 24, 2005 4:55 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)In reply to: Frankly I Don't See Either Side As the Future... by emkey Parent article: Ballmer: Microsoft to go after Linux strongholds (ZDNet)
In what sense are we heading towards huge CPU counts? Intel had a system with 1024 286s out when 286s were the going thing. At a smaller level, my old university replaced a 24 CPU Dynamix machine with a 2 CPU Sun machine some time ago.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but what BlueGene does is esoteric, and I don't see any indications that the world is going to systems where a large number of CPUs have to be kept in tight lock-step. I don't see that most problems are best solved by such low-level parallelism; a lot of parallel problems have a certain minimal chunk that can takes hundreds, thousands or even millions or billions of clock cycles.
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Frankly I Don't See Either Side As the Future... Posted Oct 24, 2005 5:39 UTC (Mon) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link] In the world of scientific computing many problems lend themselves well to massive parallelization. And as you add more cpu's you can increase the problem size and/or decrease the scale at which you simulate. More CPU's means new problems can be solved. It is my understanding that scientists could easily make use of a system ten or even twenty times as fast as BlueGene/L.
You do touch on an important issue though. Some problems may take a second or less per clock step. Others might take many times as long. The quicker the clock cycle the more likely a particular application is to benefit from the sort of approach that IBM took with BlueGene/L, as random perturbations are going to have a much larger impact on performance in that scenario.
IBM has announced the sale of additional systems beyond the original sale. I doubt these systems are cheap, so at least some people see value in them.
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