Forget Moore's Law?

Roland Piquepaille writes "On a day where CNET News.com releases a story named "Moore's Law to roll on for another decade," it's refreshing to look at another view. Michael S. Malone says we should forget Moore's law, not because it isn't true, but mainly because it has become dangerous. "An extraordinary announcement was made a couple of months ago, one that may mark a turning point in the high-tech story. It was a statement by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. His words were both simple and devastating: when asked how the 64-bit Itanium, the new megaprocessor from Intel and Hewlett-Packard, would affect Google, Mr. Schmidt replied that it wouldn't. Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors." Check this column for other statements by Marc Andreessen or Gordon Moore himself. If you have time, read the long Red Herring article for other interesting thoughts."

Comments

Re:Future of Supercomputing

[Troy Baer]

Check out who's on top of the TOP 500 supercomputers. US? Nope. Cluster? Nope. The top computer in the world is the Earth Simulator in Japan. It's not a cluster of lower end processors. It was built from the ground up with one idea -- speed. Unsurprisingly it uses traditional vector processing techniques developed by Cray to achieve this power. And how does it compare with the next in line? It blows them away. Absolutely blows them away.

It's worth noting that the Earth Simulator is actually a cluster of vector mainframes (NEC SX-6s) using a custom interconnect. You could do something similar with the Cray X-1 if you had US$400M or so to spend.

I recently read a very interesting article about this (I can't remember where - I tried googling) which basically stated that the US has lost it's edge in supercomputing. The reason was two fold: (1) less government and private funding for supercomputing projects and (2) a reliance on clustering.

If you're referring to the article I think you are, it was specifically talking in the context of weather simulation -- an application area where vector systems are known to excel (hence why the Earth Simulator does so well at it). The problem is that vector systems aren't always as cost-effective as clusters for a highly heterogeneous workload. With vector systems, a good deal of the cost is in the memory subsystem (often capable of several 10s of GB/s in memory bandwidth), but not every application needs heavy-duty memory bandwidth. Where I work, we've got benchmarks that show a cluster of Itanium-2 systems wiping the walls with a vector machine for some applications (specifically structural dynamics and some types of quantum chemistry calcuations), and others where a bunch of cheap AMDs beat everything in sight (on some bioinformatics stuff). It all depends on what your workload is.

--Troy