Supercomputer On-a-Chip Prototype Unveiled

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at University of Maryland have developed a prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers. The new technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip and is 'capable of computing speeds up to 100 times faster than current desktops.' The prototype 'uses rich algorithmic theory to address the practical problem of building an easy-to-program multicore computer.' Readers can win $500 in cash and write their names in the history of computer science by naming the new technology."

Comments

"Cell"

[Doc Ruby]

I call the "supercomputer on a chip" the "Cell microprocessor". Of course, next year, it won't be so super. But there will be a new one that's really super.

Taken?

[bryan1945]

"Readers can win $500 in cash and write their names in the history of computer science by naming the new technology."

Is "Clippy" taken?

Re:Taken?

[trolltalk.com]

Chipzilla would be good, except that's what everyone calls Intel. I guess we'll have to settle for "CowboyNealOnAChip". Or "theChipThatCanActuallyRunJavaProgramsWithinTheUni versesLifetime"

What gets me is that that there's a dropdown in the entry form to choose your country, as well as asking you for your state or province, but the rules state:

WHO MAY ENTER: Open to all legal residents of the 50 United States (including the District of Columbia) who are 18 years or older in their respective US state at time of entry. Individuals employed by the University of Maryland, College Park. ("University") as faculty, exempt or non-exempt employees, and members of their immediate family or persons living in the same household, are not eligible to enter or win.

I hope their chip design is better thought out than the contest form.

WTF?

[msauve]

We have microcomputers and supercomputers and nothing in between? Seems to be a bit of hyperbole involved here.

Re:WTF?

[gardyloo]

We have microcomputers and supercomputers and nothing in between? Seems to be a bit of hyperbole involved here. Most. Insightful. Post. Ever. ;)

Re:WTF?

[Kadin2048]

but what is even the high-end gamer going to need a chip 100 times faster than today's machines for any time in the next decade?

If you compare megahertz-cores (number of megahertz times number of cores at that speed), I suspect that there's been almost a 100x increase in the past 10 years, at least if you look from the low end a decade ago to the high end of personal computers now.

I don't see why the next ten years would be any different. Operating systems will continue to get more bloated, software packages will get more feature-stuffed, games will continue to demand just slightly more than whatever's available to most people with expenses and regular lives, and most people will buy a new machine every few years based on whatever's on sale for $500 at Best Buy when their old one gets clogged with spyware.

Sure, 100x might be a bit of a stretch (I'm not sure whether silicon will go that much further and I'm not totally convinced that parallelism is the solution for general-purpose computing), but if that kind of power was available, it would be put to use.

Software expands to fill the resources made available to it, and then some. Always has and always will.

My Name

[the eric conspiracy]

'Space Heater'

Confidence: Low

[Lije Baley]

Vaporac. Vaporlon. Vaporium. Whatever...

I name it

[Kohath]

Bob

Re:Name ?

[DigiShaman]

Supercomputer-On-a-Chip, or SOAC (pronounced soak).

"Need your data processed in a jiffy? Then SOAC your data on our new chip. All yours for $19.95*!

*sorry, no CODS accepted

Overhyped

[rivenmyst137]

Oh, for god's sake. I don't understand why this is getting so much press. It was stupid when it went up on Digg, and it's stupid that it's showing up here. This isn't substantially different from any of the other parallel architecture and programming work that's been going on for the last two decades. Their benchmarks are against embarrassingly parallelizable algorithms like matrix multiplies and randomized quicksort, things that any half-intelligent lemur (with a math and cs class or two) could get to run quickly. The hard part is speeding up your average desktop application which, I guarantee you, is not spending the majority of its time doing matrix multiplies.

On top of that, their "parallel extension of von Neumann" amounts to adding primitives to start and stop threads into the language. Again, any half-intelligent lemur (with a slightly different skill set from the first) could have done that. And I think a few actually have (at the risk of comparing language researchers to lemurs). It doesn't solve the underlying problem.

Oh, and did we mention no floating point and the lack of any memory bandwidth to get data into and out of this thing?

This is over-hyped research and shameless self-promotion, and for some weird reason the press seems to be buying it. Stop it.

Re:Overhyped

[Doppler00]

Yeah this article is pretty week. "Woohoo! Look we took a picture of a last generation FPGA development board and wrote some nifty programs for it that prove our pet project!" I think very little of things like this make it outside of academia. I'm not saying this research is unworthy, just not news worthy.

And "parallel extension of von Neumann" exists. It's called OpenMP and it still takes a skilled programmer to understand.

Look at that board... it uses "SmartMedia" yeah... that means that:

1. This is OLD research
2. The board developers didn't have a clue
3. A very old development board is being used.

Human-guided autovectorization.

[Ayanami Rei]

You know, autovectorization looks good on paper. But for most tasks, it really doesn't net you any benefit unless you can separate all your work into non-overlapping chunks. You can't have any interdependancies on your working set (or risk expensive, non-scalable locking), and if you're all pulling from a single data source to split up the analysis work you'll spend a lot of time in contention for the pipe to that resource.

For example, it wouldn't make searching a database (scratch that, searching any data set) any faster unless the index was already pre-split among the processing units.

In this architecture the processing units have the same bus to RAM and disk on the front and back ends and have to deal with contention.

Your system is only as fast as the slowest serial part. Typically this is storage media, a network connection, or a memory crossbar. Processors really are fast enough for the non-embarrasingly parallel stuff. They are at the right ratio with respect to the other slower busses to do most general purpose work.

If you want to do more than that then its other things; storage media, memory, I/O busses -- that need to be multiplied in density and number. Only then can we see higher throughput.

Autovectorization is only good for things we already have offloading for anyway (TCP encryption, graphics, sound)... and for those general purpose cases like in Game AI where you might want a linear algebra boost NVidia has beaten these guys to the punch with the GP stream processing in the newest chips and the very flexible Cg language/environment.

Re:Limited Practical Applications (for now)

[p0tat03]

While I agree there are certain leaps to be made before this can be a mass market item, I disagree fundamentally with point 1 that you make. You could have made the exact argument about the old DOS Lotus office suite way back, 15 years ago. Those things still word process, and a 386 33MHz is certainly no slouch - I never had to sat around waiting for the software to respond to me or finish some ridiculously long task.

I'm sure you'd agree that these newfangled Pentiums and Core Duos are quite useful, even for the end user.

Think about features like predictive and contextual actions. Desktop search? Search-as-you-type? There are many ways to improve the usability of computers thyat require more and more performance. Honestly, if we can invent faster computers, we will invent ways to put the power to use in a productive, tangible way.

Re:Name ?

[OctoberSky]

Babywulf Cluster

Re:Name ?

[hAckz0r]

What's wrong with Supercomputer On-a-Chip (c) ?

Oh great, I can hear the PR advertisements already; "Put a SOC in it".

Re:Limited Practical Applications (for now)

[thesandbender]

I'm going to make an assumption and say that you don't do a lot of system programming. Threaded applications depend... heavily... on synchronizing data access. You simply can't take a single threaded application and break it out across threads without having some context of how it's accessing it's data and why. Imagine landing planes at an airport. It's a serial process... you just can't arbitrarily run it in parallel... "bad things" (tm) happen. The "algorithms" Mr. Vishkin is speaking of have no way of determining the context of code being executed and trying to break it out is a disaster waiting to happen.

There are applications where massive parallelism like this is fantastic... using my initial example... encoding video. Throw each frame off to one of the processors and you're processing 300 at a time (even there there are limitations because each frame requires information from the previous).

But I stand my statement.. anyone who says they can take a serial application and run it in parallel is full of sh*t and they know it. In certain, limited circumstances, yes... but in general. NO.

Please vote on the new name

[cashman73]

I will either nominate the name, "Giant Douche," or, "Turd Sandwich," depending on which one slashdotters vote for.

Re:There's nothing here

[James McP]

Here's the deal.

Up 'til now, Parallel Random Access Model (PRAM) computing has been a theory of parallel processing that was a thought model. It hadn't been built. Some people had written programs to emulate a PRAM computer but they were not complete versions.

It could work at a snail's pace and still be a technological accomplishment as it is the very first, complete, working, hardware PRAM computer. It's on par with the Z3, Colossus and Eniac, the first programmable computers (German, English, American, in historical order).

Fortunately, they made the algorithms work well, or at least, if the press release it to be believed, work so that 64 75Mhz computers could produce 100x the performance of a current desktop on at least one particular function. Which is pretty impressive in first-time hardware even if it turns out to be an obscurely used math function known only to about a dozen coders.

Hand over the $500 right now

[Enderandrew]

iPerbole©

Transputer?

[MadMidnightBomber]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer