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

clustering

[mirko]

he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors

I guess this is better to use interconnected devices in an interconnected world.

where I work, we recently traded our Sun E10k for several E450 between which we load balance request.
It surprisingly works very well.

I guess Google's approach is then an efficient one.

Re:clustering

[beh]

The question is always, what you're doing.

Google's approach is good for google. If Google would want to make good use of significantly faster CPUs, they would also need significantly more RAM in their machines (a CPU faster by a factor of 10 can't yield a speed-up factor of ten, if the network can't deliver the data fast enough).

For Google it's fine, if a request can be done in say half-a-second on a slower machine, that is a lot cheaper then a 10* as fast machine doing each request in .05 seconds, but the machine costs 50* more than the slower machine.
On the other hand, if you have a job that can only be done sequentially (or can't be parallelized all to well), then having 100s of computers won't help you very much... ...on the other hand - there is one question left: Is it really worth while having 100s or 1000s of PC class servers working your requests as opposed to a handful really fast servers?

The more expensive servers will definitely be more expensive when you buy them - on the other hand the more expensive faster machines might save you a lot of money in turns of less rent for the offices (lower space requirements) or - perhaps even more important - save on energy...

The company where I'm working switched all their work PCs to TFTs relatively early, when TFTs were still expensive. The company said, that this step was done on the expected cost saving in power bills and also saving on air conditioning in rooms with lots of CRTs...

Future of Supercomputing

[jaaron]

Clustering has definitely won out in the United States mostly due to the appeal of cheap processing power, but that doesn't mean that clustering is always best. Like another poster mentioned, it depends on what you're doing. For Google, clustering is probably a good solution, but for high end supercomputing, it doesn't always work.

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.

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. There is communication overhead in clustering that dwarfs similar problems in traditional supercomputers. Clusters can scale, but the max speed is limited.

Before you start thinking that it doesn't matter and that the beowulf in your bedroom can compare to any Cray, recognize that there are still problems within science that would take ages to complete. These are very different problems from those facing Google, but they are nonetheless real and important.