Grid Processing

c1ay writes "We've all heard the new buzzword, "grid computing" quite a bit in the news recently. Now the EE Times reports that a team of computer architects at the University of Texas here plans to develop prototypes of an adaptive, gridlike processor that exploits instruction-level parallelism. The prototypes will include four Trips(Tera-op Reliable Intelligently Adaptive Processing System) processors, each containing 16 execution units laid out in a 4 x 4 grid. By the end of the decade, when 32-nanometer process technology is available, the goal is to have tens of processing units on a single die, delivering more than 1 trillion operations per second. In an age where clusters are becoming more prevalent for parallel computing I've often wondered where the parallel processor was. How about you?"

Comments

What sort of computations will this be good at?

[rhetland]

I use parallel computing on a cluster, in which I divide up my computational domain into a number of chunks, and each chunk is farmed out to a processor. Communication between the processes is required at the chunk boundaries.

For this case, I see how my code is partitioned, and I also understand (on a general level, at least) what the limitations on speed are: information based between the chunks.

Now, how will this processor do its 'instruction level' parallelization? Will it be great at do loops (one 'do' per processer)? Will it be like a mini vector processor? What will break down the efficiency of the parallelization?

I have found that efficiency in parallelization is very application dependent after about 8-32 procesors. Will this break that barrier?

Most importantly, will it kick butt for MY applications?