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Supercomputing: Raw Power vs. Massive Storage
securitas writes "The NY Times reports that a pair of Microsoft researchers are challenging the federal policy on funding supercomputers. Gordon Bell and Jim Gray argue that the money would be better spent on massive storage instead of ultra-fast computers because they believe today's supercomputing centers will be tomorrow's superdata centers. They advocate building cheap Linux-based Beowulf clusters (PCs in parallel) instead of supercomputers." NYTimes free reg blah blah.
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Just use the google link!
Gordon Bell and Jim Gray are not just "a pair of Microsoft researchers". They are two of the biggest names in high-performance computing. Gordon Bell awards, anyone?
You could at least use partner=SLASHDOT
Mod this guy up. He's really telling the truth!
Loosely coupled clusters like PDSF are great for work like what the high energy physics people do, like SNO.
However, somethings work better on vector architectures such as climate models and fusion work: there is a reason why the Spanish Met troops bought a Cray. Additionally, some chemistry, many fusion and several other codes work best on vector architectures.
There guys presented their global warming work where at my job. They've developed their climate code though as a parallel one. See here. One of the places that they have been running is on seaborg, an IBM RS/6000 with over 6k and near 7k processors.
Interestingly, the PCM guys presented what they wanted for an uber'puter. While it had massive amounts of storage, it was also a 500 *PETAFLOP* SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE machine.
*clickety clack* That'd be something like 166,666,666 Athlons. IDK of any interconnects that handle that. Can you imagine being an admin? Better hope you're good on rollerblades zipping to and fro replacing those oh-so-reliable commodity disks and CPUs...even if you have a .05% failure rate, that's still too damn much. As an admin, that'd be a huge waste of time. It'd also wreck havoc on the guys running stuff.
Or is that what grad students are for? To attempt such a silly thing and then admin it? ;)
Seriously tho. To get from here to their, we're going to need some exotic techs...not just more 'attack of the killer micros'.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?