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Two Directions for the Future of Supercomputing
aarondsouza writes: "The NY Times (registration required, mumble... mutter...) has this story on two different directions being taken in the supercomputing community. The Los Alamos labs have a couple of new toys. One built for raw numbercrunching speed, and the other for efficiency. The article has interesting numbers on the performance/price (price in the power consumption and maintenance sense) ratios for the two machines. As an aside... 'Deep Blue', 'Green Blade' ... wonder what Google Sets would think of that..."
Or better, give a userid and passwd for a NYTimes account.
I'm sure it's legal. It's like sharing/swapping discount passes at the supermarket.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
The Q machine is a big cluster of Alpha servers with some kind of fast interconnect. The Green Destiny cluster seems to be a Transmeta blade cluster with some kind of commodity interconnect. Both are basically big collections of independent CPU's talking over some kind of fast network connection.
They are distributed memory clusters, each machine has it's own memory and they interact through a fast network.
There are other architectures where you have all the processors sharing the same memory, and they communicate over the memory bus. Kind of like the difference between 16 PC's talking over gigabit ethernet, and a 16 processor Sun box.
At another level there is the whole vector vs. scalar architecture. The japanese have a 36 teraflop vector supercomputer that leaves our machines in the dust.
The article is misleading because the machines described are at different ends of a price spectrum, not at differents ends of an architectural spectrum. You aren't looking at different approaches, you're just looking at different price points.
I think if you add up all the Watts sucked up by the myriads of smaller PC's in those projects, you'd get a respectable amount of electricity too... Imagine just the inefficiency of having monitor screens on all these machines sucking up power alone.
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From the article:
"Armed with all this computing power, Q's keepers plan to take on what for the Energy Department, anyway, is the Holy Grail of supercomputing: a full-scale, three-dimensional simulation of the physics involved in a nuclear explosion."
Come on, for pete's sake, can't we do better stuff with this than simulate the physics in a nuclear explosion? Honestly, who cares about that. We all know it's bad, real bad. Move on to something near and dear to a lot of us out there...cancer, AIDS, Heart Disease,etc.
This is probably an unpopular view, but damn, enough destruction already.
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Ok, Q is rated at 30 teraops at 5 MW. Green Destiny is capable of 160 gigaflops at 5 kW.
This means that the power efficiency difference is just a mere factor of 5. The problem with supercomputing is of course scaling and interconnecting the cpu... The author argues that the Green Destiny is "not so picky", and "hums away contentedly next to piles of cardboard boxes and computer parts" while Q requires special buildings and monstrous cooling installations. Yeah, so what, it is a much smaller machine.
Of course it is easier to build a smaller machine than a large machine. I would say that despite the fact that Green Destiny is 0.5% as fast as Q and is designed with power consumption in mind it is just 5 times as efficient.
Can anyone tell me (or point to a resource) how CPU power consumption depends on transistor size and clock frequency. Will a chip with a given size operating at a given clock frequency require the same amount of power, regardless of the number of transistors in it?