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?

Comments

Do the math

[InodoroPereyra]

This is very, very cool. For one thing, a bottleneck in supercomputers is in most cases the network. In this regard, dropping some per/node performance might not affect the overall performance for applications that need intensive interprocess communication.

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 ... :-)

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.