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DARPA Awards HPC Contracts To IBM, Cray, Not Sun
snedecor writes "DARPA has awarded a third round of funding for the next-generation petascale computing system. IBM and Cray roughly split the $494M, while Sun, with little track record, received none. This is in spite of Sun's radical proposal for proximity communication."
IBM's radical idea was to release whatever product they'll have ready in 2010, but with enough processors to reach petascale. Go Blue! Had Sun offered up Niagara2 @ petascale, then they might have had a chance to win as well.
Niagra and Niagra 2 have lousy floating point performance (1 FPU for entire chip, shared by all the cores). Given that the DARPA project is for FLOPS, Nigra is just about the worst processor one could propose for the project.
I love the Niagra design; for 90% of what I need done, it does great. It's just terrible at floating point.
Sometime down the line, past Niagra 2, one could posit a version of such a chip with enough floating point units that it's efficient in FLOPS; it's an obvious upgrade of the current chips. However, that also is not optimal for FLOPS in the HPC regime. HPC is all about hiring enough computer scientists and physicists to micro-optimize the code so that you make close to theoretical maximum efficiency in utilizing the CPU cores. Niagra is all about keeping enough contexts on the chip that you can productively use the time that normal programs spend wasted, waiting for main memory accesses and so on. HPC by definition spends the CS time and effort to avoid that already.
H-P and SGI were knocked-out at the end of round one; Cray, IBM & Sun were selected
for round two.
Sun's HPC contribution is in optical chip interconnects, described (somewaht fluffily) at http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2006/2006-04-07_ Sun_on_HPCS.html
davecb@spamcop.net