Re: Roadrunner Supercomputer using 12,960 CELL Processors Hits 1

On Jun 10, 5:34 am, "mr deo" <rst...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:

>
>  Nothing special about it tbh.
> If we had moved into DNA, Chemical, or Optical processors to manage such
a
> task then I would say it is special..
> The fact that they have managed to bolt on different types of processors
> onto a board (think GPU, CPU, and MMPU) and then link the boards
together
> (Think NIC) really doesnt show any innovation.
>
> I know my example isnt the same as what we have going on in these
servers,
> but in essence, anyone who wants to throw  400m into a project can see
them
> double what this kit is doing, so it's nothing but a monetary step.
>

It's hard to know what your perspective could be.  The general
question is: what could you do if you coupled a high-end out-of-order
general-purpose CPU with a beefy compute engine and serious
interconnect.  Cell (or similar compute-intensive hardware) has
im****tant implications for power consumption.  Balancing the memory,
the bandwidth of all the interconnects, the switches, and the compute
density of each node (how many processors?  connected how?) is more
than just buying a bunch of Macs and hooking them together with one
gigabyte ethernet.

I'd like to see a serious discussion of this machine, but this thread
with all these cross-posts isn't the right place to be doing it.  The
one petabyte crap is pure national labs PR.  The interesting stuff is
elsewhere.  I'm sorry if you can't see that.

Robert.