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Supercruncher Applications
starheight writes "Bill McColl has written an article contrasting traditional massively parallel supercomputing with a whole new generation of compute-intensive apps that require massively scalable architectures and can deliver both incredible throughput and real-time responsivenes when processing millions or billions of tasks."
I've seen the things - trust me, they're massive!
The term "massively parallel" indicates a system operating without those constraint.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Actually, massively parallel has a meaning. For example, the 131,072 CPU beast designed by IBM. This computer is designed to solve problems that have another term attached to them, and that is "embarassingly parallel" problems. Your average task is not embarassingly parallel, and thus, is difficult to scale to a massively parallel system. It would take a lot of effort, see?
But some problems can use massively parallel computers, designed to solve embarassingly parallel problems.
For sparse matrices, you can use algorithms that are vastly more efficient than the algorithms you otherwise would use for non-sparce matrices of the same size. This is called sparse linear algebra. If you can't use the algorithms for sparse linear algebra, it doesn't matter whether you call it "dense", "average", "standard", "normal", "regular", "common", or what the fuck else.
Again, this refers to the algorithms used. There are different algorithms you use in each case. And sure enough, there are other types, such as grids structured in non-standard ways, that some mathematicians might have developed special algorithms for. However, these are the common types of computations run.
No. It's like listing the major uses of motorized vehicles, and among them putting "transport of goods", and "transport of people", and then have some dude on the Internet point out that this sounds funny.
100 cores is not massively parallel. The kind of scaling we're talking about is much higher. Think thousands of cores each with hundreds of threads.
This is the kind of scaling that weather centers are just starting to reach today. It's the kind of scaling that will require a radical rethinking of how consumer software is designed and what tools we need to make that design process easier.
In this world, software is king. You won't care who your chip vendor is. You'll care who provides your compiler, debugger, performance analysis tools and other such things.
Fascinating that a story purporting to be about supercomputers is actually a summary of Weightless Economy theory. The theory is that the wealthiest countries can't achieve more wealth by implementing things anymore. They can't increase their net worth by manufacturing or solving math problems. They have to turn instead to philosophical goals like people management, interpreting literature, creating works of art.
The supercomputer function is still the same. It still solves algebra, n-body methods, structured grids, and finite state machines. The user of the supercomputer is different. The user is now living on $1 a day in Mongolia.
For the wealthiest countries to stay wealthy, they have to focus on not the computing part but marketing the computing, creating the interface to the math, managing the business around the computing.