Efficient Supercomputing with Green Destiny

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday November 19, 2003 @03:42PM from the transmeta-in-the-news-again dept.

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?

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supercomputers vs man's only finite resource by WiPEOUT · 2003-11-19 16:02 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.