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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..."
"The NY Times (registration required, mumble... mutter..."
next time you put "registration" between brackets, followed by two words, you better make sure that those two words are userID and paswd !
I really wonder what the NYT logfile-monkeys think when they see a zillion 'mumble/mutter' login attempts...
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
How many people can hold the handle that turns the crank? Or in modern terms, how much juice can you reasonably throw at these beautiful monsters!?
So with this in mind, I don't think it's too off-topic to mention this article which talks about the gutting of funding for fuel cells. Or this student research paper site which talks about the inherent economy of different sources of energy in various terms. (Warning! They are pro-nuclear, so YMMV!) Also, if you are interested in where this topic takes you you should stop off here to follow up on whatever takes your fancy as far as energy production goes. They've got a veritable mountain of info. Check out their hydrogen economy stuff.
Whoever thought up the names of the two machines needs to get a grant or something! Green Destiny, mmmmmmm! Q, grooowwwl!
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?
Latency issues are still going to be there and which would make Grid environments unsuitable for the majority of simulations. You can't do nuclear event simulations effectively if you have a multiple second delay in communicating between processors which you get in Grids.
On the other hand Grids do have several advantages in terms of providing similar TFLOPS for a much lower price, by using several geographically seperated systems you give access to more researchers and research in this area has a lot of practical spin offs in the future.
Lower power usage is a good direction for regular computing, too.
Many have noticed the increasing trend towards laptop computers as a primary computer for people concerned not just about portability, but also about space, electric power and noise issues in their abodes. A noisy tower and 60 lb space-hogging CRT is too uncool. Sleek LCD monitors, minimalist keyboards and no noisy cooling fans is where it's at.
And, many have noted too, that most CPU power is going to waste these days. Except for a few games and for the server environment, most CPUs spend their time waiting for someone to type in a character into MS Word or click the next link for a browser.
I think you'll see a shift to more energy efficient CPUs in a big way in a much broader market sector than supercomputing. Namely, desktop client access devices will go this route, too.
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