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Efficient Supercomputing with Green Destiny
gManZboy writes: "Is it an oxymoron to have an efficient supercomputer? Wu-Chun Feng (Los Alamos National Laboratory) doesn't believe so - Green Destiny and its children are Transmeta-based supercomputers that Wu thinks are fast enough, at a fraction of the heat/energy/cost, according to ACM Queue." 240 processors running under 5.2kW (or less!) is nothing to sneeze at. The article offers up this question: might there be other metrics that might be important to supercomputing, rather than relying solely on processing speed?
How much of a footprint and weight they take up as a metric to consider? ;)
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Why bother? If you have to sacrifice computational power for energy efficiency, then what is the point of having a supercomputer? Isn't compute power the whole purpose of having a supercomputer?
Why are supercomputers primarily benchmarked by their speed? The answer comes when you consider that almost all labour-saving devices are measured in the work they perform in a given period of time.
Time is the only truly finite resource from a human perspective. As technology has progressed, distances have been conquered, vast energies harnessed, but old Father Time is still inescapable.
As a result, we place great value on just how much time is taken to accomplish anything.
Just look at cars - time was the only thing many people would look at is cubic inches or horsepower. Now most people who buy a car are more concerned with other features - passenger comfort, style, efficiency. I would guess this is a shift from car-oriented people buying cars to everyone buying cars as they became more of a necessity.
Computer manufacturers are only just starting to see this, making smaller, quieter, cooler-running machines. Hopefully they'll continue to look at what their customers actually need rather than simply putting out chips with higher clock speeds.
Lottsa years ago I used to maintain a CDC 7600, not only did it need full refrigeration, but it's original design spec was for an MTBF of 15 hours! The designers reckoned that it was so fast that the biggest job imaginable could be run in that time. Of course it did better than that in the end, but it was a bugger of a job to fix, and the backplane was 6 inches deep in twisted pair wires. Just imagine making wiring changes.
Money is usually finite, too. Especially in research. Power costs money. Cooling also costs money.
It's still valuable to have one or a few really friggin' fast processors versus a whole lot of smaller processors if you're running tasks that can't easily be subdivided. This is why people are still buying single processor PCs rather than multiprocessor boxen. If you're buying the setup for a specific purpose and multiple slower CPUs will do the job for you, then that's great; but you'll get more flexibility with speedy processors.
That only shows how timely the definition of a supercomputer is. 100 common desktop machines are very uncommon and obsolete 3 years from now.
I think energy efficiency (MOPS/Watt) is a very relevant metric. The reason why my PDA cannot do wideband software radio or anything that needs lots of GOPS is energy-efficiency. If the same PDA could carry 100 XScale processors instead of 1 with the same battery lifetime, I'm sure we'll have applications for it in no time.