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Supercomputers To Move To Specialization?
lucasw writes "The Japan Earth Simulator outperformed a computer at Los Alamos (previously the world's fastest) by a factor of three while using fewer, more specialized processors and advanced interconnect technology. This spawned multiple government reports that many suspected would ask for more funding in the U.S. for custom supercomputer architectures and less emphasis on clustering commodity hardware. One report released yesterday suggests a balanced approach."
There's a far more important thing to worry about - could this be the end of "Imagine a Beowulf Cluster ..." jokes? After all, the phrase "Imagine a custom-built supercomputer utilising similar technology (albeit more specialised) to that found in one of those!" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?
Do HP's Saturn or other such special-purpose processors have hard-coded higher-level functions?
Indeed, functions Cost_an_arm_and_a_leg() and Fork_over_much_dough() are hard-coded, and always return a value of "1".
The unofficial