Cray Introduces Adaptive Supercomputing

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.'"

Comments

Good Motto

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:Good Motto

[dildo]

It is possible to build comptuers that are optimized for certain kinds of calculations.

For example, Gerald Sussman of MIT (a computer scientist) and a Jack Wisdom (a physicist) decided they wanted to do long-term modelling of the solar system's evolution over time. Long time modelling of a multi-body system requires a fantastic amount of calculation. What is the best way to do it?

Sussman and Wisdom came up with a crafty idea: build a computer that is specially configured at the hardware level to do the modelling. Sussman and his colleagues decided that with off-the-shelf parts they could build a computer that would be just as or more capable of modeling this system than a supercomputer would be. The result was the Digital Orrery, a relativlely cheap computer that gave great results. (It is now featured in the Smithsonian museum.)

Think of it: if your computer is going to be doing the Fast Fourier Transform 6.02x10^23 times per day, why not build a superfast chip that does nothing but the FFT rather than express it as software? It's a pretty cool idea. I think this is the sort of thing that Cray computers claims to want to do with its motto.

Coolest Looking Supercomputers

[Eightyford]

Cray always made the coolest looking supercomputers. Here's an interesting bit of trivia:

The Cray T3D MC cabinet had an Apple Macintosh PowerBook laptop built into its front. Its only purpose was to display animated Cray Research and T3D logos on its color LCD screen.

This begs the question...

[__aaclcg7560]

So if I want to run Mine Sweeper, Cray will adapt one of their supercomputers to the requirements of this game? Sweet!

Re:Cray as a company in general

[SillyNickName4me]

The story is interesting, but also full of almost going under, being bought, sold, parent companies going bankrupt and what not..

The Cray we know now shares a name with the Cray that produced the famous Cray supercomputers of old, they also have some nice technology around, but there the similarities stop.

Re:Co-processors anyone?

[sketerpot]

There are actually processors out there with compilers which can compile a few bottleneck C/C++ functions into hardware on an integrated FPGA. This expands the CPU instruction set in application-specific ways and can, in some cases, give absolutely enormous speedups.

In other words, they're working on processors which are programmed in general-purpose languages, but which adapt their hardware to the specific program.