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Supercruncher Applications

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the many-processors-make-light-work dept.

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."

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Slow news day, huh? by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Slow news day, huh?

    Can we please have a "no links to random, boring blogs week" on Slashdot?

  2. Re:Massively parallel?! by Lord+Crc · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There is no such thing as "massively parallel!" It makes no sense! Parallel in qualitative, NOT quantitative! Things are either parallel or they're not, there are no degrees of "parallelness!"

    Sure there are. Say you want to find the maximum of 4 integers. You can do that in parallel, but you won't gain much if you have more than two processors (or execution units). Contrast this with say rendering an image using a path tracer, where each ray is independent of each other. First problem is hard to scale up, second one isn't. I'd say that means that ray tracing is a "more parallel" task.

    Also, writing algorithms that has to run on 10000 processors efficiently is not exactly the same as one that has to run on 4 processors, in the same way that writing a multiplayer game that handles four players isn't the same as writing one that can handle thousands of concurrent players. So they toss on the "massive" part to separate the cases. At least that's my take on it.

  3. Errors by Beryllium+Sphere(tm) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...web players such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay. For these systems, scale, resilience and real-time throughput are major concerns. In contrast to the other two classes, these systems need to process vast numbers of simultaneous tasks, to deliver guaranteed real-time performance...

    None of those offer or require real-time guarantees.

    Unlike today's search engines and data mining systems, which essentially search the past, continuous search is about searching the present and the future.

    Google Alerts is here now.

    A better article would have started with the table that defines "supercruncher" and proceeded to describe the architectural issues of building one. Ideally it would have addressed the software challenges.