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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?
The MHZ war has been going on for soooo long that everyone just excepted that faster MHZ related to faster machines. Well, 64Bit computers are placing chip manufactures in a position where they have to market on a platform that declares that MHZ doesn't really matter.
I think the question is a bit naive though as everyone knows a hundred software tools to rate performance of CPUs rather than just relying on MHZ.
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I was talking to a friend the other day about a bunch of lab computers that my school is getting rid of - a bunch of old Pentium MMX's. He suggested turning them into a cluster. But after thinking about it, I realized that the group of about 10 old computers we had would consume more power - and would likely be considerably slower than a single one of the 2.4Ghz Dell's that replaced them. "What's the point?" I said.
Applying that here, the little VIA chips run at roughly the speed of a Celeron 500 or so, I'd say something like an AMD Athlon 3GHz would be just about as fast as about 6 of the VIA chips. So you are still saving some power, but as not as much as it would seem as first, as you need many low power chips to equal the speed of one faster chip. Not to mention power consumed by having more motherboards, network cards, switches, and other associated hardware.
Something to really look at is the cluster of G5's. The G5 chips use a lot less power than their x86 counterparts. I bet that cluster of G5's is probably right up there in terms of processing power per watt as this VIA super computer. And it's way more cool to boot.
The other point is: how expensive it is to support a cluster ? Not only the energy consumption, but also the infraestructure. It is pretty darn difficult to keep a thousand processors cold. You may need a special building, special power supply for it, etc.
A final point: as far as I know, the rule of thumb is that the floating point performance with these energy efficient processors is of the same order of magnitude as regular processor, may be a factor 2 difference.
You do the math ... :-)
No, supercomputers that can do a lot of image processing cannot waste power simply because it might be available.
Modest supercomputers are used in the military on airframes. Power consumption is important for at least two reasons. First is the wattage and power draw. Second, and more subtle, it that the cooling requirements while flying at high altitude become more important than simple fan noise. Pentiums burn up no matter what you do. PowerPCs@10Watts with conduction cooling will survive.
That is the only advantage of using a Transmeta CPU. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just use a regular VLIW CPU without all the x86 code morphing stuff?