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."

Comments

Re:Mega-petaflops for people

[chuckymonkey]

Your smug is showing, I work with one on a daily basis for the government in the missile defense arena. Hell in two months I'm going to be building one of those new IBM machines, we just signed the purchase with IBM. Yes I said that I'm going to be building one, IBM is not allowed in our building. I don't even have to rent nodes of it, we have it all to ourselves. It's not the applications or the hardware that is the problem, it's the latency. I don't care how fast your internet connection is, you cannot match the interconnect fabric of these machines. If you want to parse out little bits of data to a vast number of computers using the spare cycles of home computers is great, I'm not trying to downplay that. You just cannot run them in parallel and do real time simulations on them. That is why we have these huge monolithic computers. Let me give you two examples: Protein folding, not parallel and also not time sensitive. More of a when you finish I'll give you a new problem to chew on. Tracking millions of orbits from shit in space, very parallel requires correct timing low latency transactions between CPU nodes. Also needs results as events occur, there's no room for "When your done I'll give you a new one". Working out the problems with star travel as the original parent said is a grand idea using a distributed system, running the simulations in real time to actually have an idea of whether or not those solutions will work is where computers such as the ones I work with come in.