Slashdot Mirror
Hardware Headaches Inevitable?
JaneWalker6847 writes "Don Becker, co-founder of the Beowulf project, describes the inevitability of hardware administration headaches and warns users not to expect a silver bullet to solve these problems." From the article: "We're about to see another revolution, which is in network adapters -- that we [will] talk directly to [them] from application level. That's a massive change in how you interface with them. And that brings about a new round of device drivers completely unlike the device drivers we had 10 years ago. So, that part of the world isn't going to stabilize anytime soon."
Hmm... Do I smell WinModem?
I'm not sure what that smell is, but its familiar.
Yes, TCP/IP offloaders, crypto offloaders, physics offloaders, FFT offloaders, have all existed. The only accepted offloader that has succeeded is the GPU, and that is because it was subsidized by the high end graphics people and people with game addictions. The cost/benefit of the other offloaders has not proven itself. Especially when you consider the rate of increase of the CPU speeds and the bottleneck of getting the data to the offloaded chip and back again. The Linux kernel mailinglist has been pretty much anti TCP/IP offloading because the time spent optimizing the drivers and the performance increase was often surpassed in a few months with a faster general purpose CPU and a generic driver that worked with all cards. This is also confounded when you have OS level TCP/IP stuff like ipchains or iptables that need their code in the OS and not on the card. FFT and physics offloaders have not taken off because of the cost/benefit loss when one takes into account the speed loss of getting the data onto the card and then the cost of the cache RAM to put on the card (if its ever enough), and then the time to get the data off of the card.
Now, what will make these things work?
A bus that is near or at the speed of memory bandwidth or a problem where the data does not need to go back to the host system. A GPU falls into the second half there. The display needs to know what its told, the computer does not need to know the details. TCP/IP offloaders have failed to catch on because of the price/performance benefit and their lack of ubiquity and commonality. Crypto offloaders are cool. Especially for the geek factor of having the keys stored on the card and zeroed out when tampered with. But again, the cost of writing specific drivers vs known CPU drivers for doing crypto and the rate of increase of cheap commodity CPUs over time often exceeds the cost/benefit of the crypto card.
Now, give me a fast bus and the ability to use my generic system RAM with one of these offloading cards, and things could change, but until then I expect this battle between the CPU and specific PUs to continue with no real winner.