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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."
The interconnects are (usually) not commodity parts -- just the servers.
As an example, the first IBM SP "supercomputers" were essentially just common Power workstations bolted into racks, but connected with a custom made SP switch.
Nevertheless, EarthSimulator has shown what can be done by designing the entire server from the ground-up with the application in mind.
We'll have to see how ASCI Purple performs...
computers like the earth simulator go vastly under utilized for the most part
From first-hand experience, such computers are running jobs almost 24x7. Due to job scheduling details there are times when some of the machine is idle, but this is still a small percentage. These machines are used for a vast array of applications, not just the advertized ones.
Now the utilization as a percentage of peak theoretical is another matter. For some algorithms, 20% of peak performance (IIRC) is considered good (ie. a particular code might only get 2 TFlops on a machine rated for 10).