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On the Supercomputer Technology Crisis

Posted by simoniker on from the superprocessor-to-the-rescue dept.

scoobrs writes "Experts claim America has been eating our 'supercomputer feed corn' by developing clusters rather than new supercomputer processors and interconnects. Forbes says America is playing catch-up and that the new federal budget items are too little too late. Cray is laying people off due to decreased federal spending and claims lower margin products have forced them to create products based on commodity parts. Red Storm, one of their new Linux-based products, is being delayed to next year."

4 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. You are all missing the point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Its the fact that clusters require higher skill to program efficiently for than do single processor systems. Plus you have all of the wasted processing power used for communication between the nodes. Granted, many problems lend themselves well to distributed computing (essentially what a cluster is, but the nodes are closer and communicate faster), but there are also problems that are handled better by a smaller amount of specialized hardware. The other point is that by using off the shelf parts, we are not really innovating in this space like we should be. We are allowing the commodity computer market determine the direction of the supercomputer market.

  2. Re:it makes sense by badboy_tw2002 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Then trust the fact that not all problems are easily attacked from a parallel perspective. This means problems where working on one section of the dataset affects large amounts of data in other sections. There's a lot of locking and waiting for tasks in other parts of the system to be completed; and a lot of data transfer/need for shared memory, which if you're bussing between cluster components, its going to be slow.

    This doesn't mean that clusters don't have some use in these regards, it just means that for these types of problems no one has figured out an efficient parallel algorithm to use on them.

  3. What tasks require high-speed interconnects? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Insightful
    One of the nice things about clusters is that they encourage people to consider how to decompose a problem so that it can work without a large high-speed shared data memory. Some of the older supercomputers were important because scientists hadn't done this work because there wasn't the economic incentive back then. Now there is one.

    So, what tasks still require a high-speed shared data memory? Answer that, and you'll understand where you can still sell a supercomputer.

    Bruce

    --
    Bruce Perens.
  4. Re:it makes sense by grawk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    As someone who works for a supercomping center, I can say that some things work VERY well on cheap unix based clusters. I am the primary admin on a 5 TFLOP cluster. We've also got a Cray X1, and while it's only 2.6 TFLOPs, it will eat my IBM's lunch when it comes to some specificly tuned tasks. Much in the same way that we can outperform mac clusters that have significantly higher floating point performance because of the speeds of the interconnects. Supercomputing is about a LOT more than just raw CPU power.