On the Supercomputer Technology Crisis

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."

Comments

Here's a thought

[couch_warrior]

I know folks who did their PhD thesis on a Cray (~100MIP +15 years ago) who now get much more computing done on a Pentium III desktop workstation. It has more megaflops and more RAM. The point - most of the research poured into "supercomputers" has been a complete waste of time. The SIMD technology of vector machines is virtually useless for general computing, but the enormous fiancial engine behind commercial CPUs has driven their R&D to pass up the performance of former "super" computers typically within 5 years. The best advice would be to just shut down the useless waste of money that is supercomputing R&D, and wait for the commercial sector to do it.