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Cray Introduces Adaptive Supercomputing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the adapting-to-complexity dept.

David Greene writes "HPCWire has a story about Cray's newly-introduced vision of Adaptive Supercomputing. The new system will combine multiple processor architectures to broaden applicability of HPC systems and reduce the complexity of HPC application development. Cray CTO Steve Scott says, 'The Cray motto is: adapt the system to the application - not the application to the system.'"

4 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Good Motto by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Cray CTO Steve Scott says, 'The Cray motto is: adapt the system to the application - not the application to the system.'

    That's a good motto, but how often do you bend the will of your application, needs or business to the limitations of the application? I've been sitting on something for a couple weeks after telling someone "You really should have accepted the information the other way, because this new way you want it is highly problematic (meaning: rather than rip it off with a simple SQL query, I'll have to do an app)"

    IMHO adapting to the needs of the user == customisationg, which also == money. Maybe it's not a bad idea at that! :-)

    In certain cases, at run-time, the system will determine the most appropriate processor for running a piece of code, and direct the execution accordingly.

    This assumes, of course, that you have X number of processors to chose from. If you can't do it, the answer is still 'throw more money at it, buy more hardware.'

    my head is still spinning from all the new buzzwords overheard at SD West 2006.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  2. Co-processors anyone? by TubeSteak · · Score: 3, Insightful
    After exhaustive analysis Cray Inc. concluded that, although multi-core commodity processors will deliver some improvement, exploiting parallelism through a variety of processor technologies using scalar, vector, multithreading and hardware accelerators (e.g., FPGAs or ClearSpeed co-processors) creates the greatest opportunity for application acceleration.
    So they're saying that instead of faster/more generalized processors, they want several specialized processors.

    Old ideas are new again.
    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  3. And What If... by Nom+du+Keyboard · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The new system will combine multiple processor architectures

    And what if I don't want multiple processor architectures, but instead just lots and lots of the single architecture my code is compiled for?

    --
    "It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
    1. Re:And What If... by flaming-opus · · Score: 3, Insightful


      The idea is that all the CPU types will be blades that all use the same router, and plug into a common backplane, and that the cabinets all cable together the same way. In all cases, I imagine there will be opterons around the periphery, as I/O nodes and running the operating system. Then you plug in compute nodes in the middle, where the computer nodes can be a bunch more opterons, or vector cpu's, or fpga's, or multithreaded cpus. There will certaintly be plenty of customers only interested in lotsa opterons on cray's fast interconnect, and they just won't buy any of the custom cpus.