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

On Jun 10, 7:19 pm, Robert Myers <rbmyers...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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.

I'd agree with mr deo.
Roadrunner interconnects look like a big step backward from other PR-
heavy American supercomputers. Hopefully, they are not as boring as in
Virginia Tech cluster that you mentioned, but not in the same class as
Cray/Sandia Red Storm, SGI/NASA Columbia or IBM/LLNL BlueGene/L.

Also it looks like programming model for Roadrunner (3 separate
architecture and many programmer-visible levels of memory hierarchy)
is much harder to use effectively than just about any big
supercomputer built up to date.

Last, but not least, performance per watt and per cubic meter seem
seriously worse than BlueGene.