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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.'"

2 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
    1. Re:Good Motto by dildo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.