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Cray, Intel To Partner On Hybrid Supercomputer
An anonymous reader writes "Intel convinced Cray to collaborate on what many believe will be the next generation of supercomputers — CPUs complemented by floating-point acceleration units. NVIDIA successfully placed its Tesla cards in an upcoming Bull supercomputer, and today we learn that Cray will be using Intel's x86 Larrabee accelerators in a supercomputer that is expected to be unveiled by 2011. It's a new chapter in the Intel-NVIDIA battle and a glimpse at the future of supercomputers operating in the petaflop range. The deal has also got to be a blow to AMD, which has been Cray's main chip supplier."
The OP's point is valid, people requesting funding have better success if they can tie their research to defense, even if it's in some vague way. As a linguist, I've seen this in my own field. For decades, a world centre for the study of the minority languages of the USSR was the University of Indiana at Bloomington. The U.S. government gave enormous amounts of funding to the scholars there, who in return just had to write a few pages in their language textbooks about Russian areal studies (local economy of a region, political organization) before proceeding on to discussions of grammar, lexicon and indigenous literature.
Depending too much on defense funding, however, can result in much disappointment when the government changes its priorities. Once the Cold War ended, most of the funding for the study of the former USSR dried up. One might imagine that it has been reassigned these days to study of the Middle East, but seeing how badly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being managed, I somehow doubt the U.S. is investing in areal studies as much as it could.
Or possibly the ludicrously powerful floating point processors known as GPUs?
Perhaps now that Intel and nVidia have commercial "floating-point acceleration units" for supercomputers, AMD/ATI will come up with something too? The Hypertransport bus is already pretty popular with supercomputers for plugging an interconnect into (Infiniband/path, as well as Cray's own) so a GPU (sorry, "floating point accelerator") that plugs directly into that bus and has direct communication with the system's CPU(s) should be pretty nice.
I know I wouldn't mind going from a dedicated graphics card to having a motherboard with two processor sockets with independent ram, cpu in one and gpu in the other. PCIe is just an unnecessary layer when the gpu could be plugged directly into the cpu's main bus.