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Researcher Discusses iPod Supercomputer
schliz writes to mention that in a recent interview with ITNews researcher John Shalf explained the purpose and some of the technical details of the newly-announced "iPod supercomputer." "Microprocessors from portable electronics like iPods could yield low-cost, low-power supercomputers for specialized scientific applications, according to computer scientist John Shalf. Along with a research team from the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Shalf is designing a supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors, which has the sole purpose of improving global climate change predictions."
But sooner or later, they come after you claiming you haven't legally purchased your global climate change predictions, or that you've been sharing them with your friends online.
"Using the embedded microprocessor technology used in mobile phones, iPods and other consumer electronic devices, the boffins propose a cost-effective machine for running complex computational models."
In other words, all be damned if they decide to implement this monstrosity using actual iPods when they could use their talent to design and build greater efficiency through Spice/HDL, manufactured boards, and a pick-and-place.
Gee, A mesh of dedicated machines, hardcoded for more efficiency than a cluster of bloated pc's designed for MS office is actually more efficient? Geddouttahere!
[/sarcastic rant]
Excuse me if I'm wrong, but would this not be more specifically a mobile microprocessor supercomputer than an iPhone supercomputer? I mean, its not as if only the iPhone uses mobile processors.
but eventually they come after you saying you haven't legally purchased your global climate predictions, or that you're sharing them with your friends online
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
...will be devoted to DRM?
Inquiring minds want to know.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Please stop hitting me!
Send this article to that Jonathan Zittrain idiot who thinks that putting the web in the hands of everyone everywhere is a failure of technology and will stifle innovation.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
with technology like this powering climate change research, its no wonder you have so many people who don't believe in the global warming theory!
low power... HAH!
There's a famous quote about supercomputers that says that supercomputers are really good memory systems, with a bit of CPU tacked on. The hard part isn't adding more MIPS -- we've done that with the massively parallel connection machine -- or even increasing speed. It's about shuttling the data around the computer efficiently so that all ALU's are constantly fed. During the cold war, Control Data had a supercomputer that came in two variants -- one for domestic use, one for export. The difference between them? Same ALU speed, but the domestic one had a scatter/gather memory access capability that sped up big matrix operations.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
The observer effect: the more energy we consume studying the effect of energy consumption on climate change, the more we'll have to incorporate this factor into our models.
Positive feedback: if the results of these studies are striking enough to merit funding for more research, we'll no doubt consume even more energy to determine the effects of energy consumption on climate change.
Self-fulfilling prophecy: if this positive feedback between funding for climate change research and supercomputing energy consumption is not counteracted by efforts to reduce supercomputing power consumption for climate change research then we're damning ourselves by studying it.
Is that a supercomputer in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
How many people are going to happily use valuable mA/h to search for alien communications etc?
A beowulf cluster of iPods?
What the hell does this have to do with ipods? They're building a supercomputer out of low-power MIPS procs..
embedded processors were, believe it or not, NOT invented by apple. I don't know if its true or not (i doubt it) but I've also heard that there were portable electronics BEFORE the ipod.
This is really cool, but slashot, come-on...most of us here are geeks, we don't need to have the word "ipod" tacked onto the end to indicate that we're talking about something small.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
BlueGenes, and their predecessor, QCDOC supercomputers, already use slightly modified low-power embedded system chips. How is this any different?
My "global climate change prediction", sans iPod:
HOT
Whale
that could predict global warming without first causing it.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
I am just making up a good excuse to buy 100 ipods using some grant money (I'll use most for "research" and have some spares---which in the meantime I can use: one for me, one for wifey, one for daughter, ah! and lets not forget our nice nephew... he said he'd mow the lawn a few times for free too). Pathetic.
Well then hopefully they'll factor in the amount of CO2 given off from generating the electricity to run these processors. Just because they're more power efficient doesn't mean they run on magic. This is like taking a bus ride across the country to protest all the CO2 given off by vehicles.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Man, operating that thing with the click-wheel is going to be a bitch.
1. collect old, broken iPods. 2. assemble iGod. 3. profit.
Onto the serious bit. This proposal is basically a reinvention of the Transputer, lots of little blobs with cpu, memory, and fast communication links. Is this because:
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I read the article, and they are planning to have special CPU chips fabbed: CPUs tailored specifically to the needs of climate modeling. I guess this will provide the lowest possible operational cost--the least electrical consumption and heat dissipation possible to solve their problem.
Quote from John Shalf:
Given how many nodes they need, optimizing for lowest operational cost probably makes sense. But calling it an "iPod Supercomputer" is pretty egregious, even by the standards of pop tech journalism.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
my iPod is wasting valuable cpu cycles that could be saving the world!
Well at least the shuffle play might be truly random.
Outlaw all electric heaters that heat using a resistance rather than microprocessors. Make heaters work with a WAN connection only.
Yeah, 32 bit ARM processors that probably use soft float (soft float is a guess!) are the way forward in super computing. You better believe it, Ripley.
Of course by the time you get enough low-power processors running to solve the the problem you'll be a major contributor to climate change yourself.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
A RAID array of zip drives?
Steve Circia did that in the 80's with a bunch of 8051's.
Funny how all we ever do now is run in circles, where is the REAL innovation?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Can you imagine if they used Zunes? All that squirting and then dying after 3 days or whatever it is as a limit. Lame minds have boggled over this...
Not just the title is misleading but the idea associated with it. Last time I checked (ok, that was a while ago), iPods came with ARM7 cores clocked at 80 MHz. Thing is, these CPUs don't have a floating point unit, so unless they write they weather simulators in fixed point arithmetic (lol, right) or go ahead with software floating point emulation (which would slow things down several times) they're not going to use these, they'd rather use more sophisticated stuff like ARM11s or Cortex A8s.
You just got troll'd!
Okay, so this should probably be on halfbakery.com, but - after my initial non-reading of the article, and my assumption that this had nothing to do with iPods, and my scoffing of the notion of a supercomputer of iPods... hmmmmmmmmm...
So just for the Friday afternoon fantasy's sake, I am envisioning a series of flat grids of iPods, communicating through their dock adapter. More like discrete workers - here's a work unit, there's your output, etc. Built in UPS (battery), ability to pause a simulation and move individual worker units in and out of the grid...
I know it's wildly impractical and couldn't solve many problems at all that couldn't be solved through other clustering approaches... but the idea just has me.... help.
Most likely the iPhone or iPod wont go anywhere for a small supercomputer. I bet the Cell processor will take over.
Did anyone else read that and see John Shaft instead of John Shalf?
Who's the computer scientist who's a sex machine to all the chicks? Shalf!
He's a complicated man and no one understands him but his supercomputer based on low-power embedded microprocessors.
I'm not dead yet!
Not to burst any ones funding bubble, but this has been done. Take a look at SiCortex. They did it, they are shipping product, and it works quite well. And it runs Linux.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
This would be so much more useful and immediately advantageous then these silly SETI and FOLDING@HOME projects that people are running.
I ran both of these for a while, but here's the thing about them, particularly SETI. It makes a lot more sense to do these calculations in 20 years, rather then now. The computing effort required compared to the available world computing power is HUGE, but it won't be nearly as much in 20 years given Moore's law. Why suck up all the electricity now, when what we do for the next 5 years I'll be able to run on my PDA in 20 minutes in 20 years?
Now, on the other hand, there's absolutely no use in predicting the weather in the past. Predicting the weather tomorrow is what is useful, and I'd be a helluva lot more likely to donate my computer to predicting the weather tomorrow then trying to find a signal from aliens that we won't be able to contact for 1000 years. I'm not against aliens and I fully believe that they're out there, but wouldn't someone's technology out there be 20 years more advanced then ours so that they would be able to run these scans 100,000 times as fast as we can today?
Try to THINK people.
The results will be easily available at 99 cents on iTunes. Of course, if it involves video, it will go for 1.99 cents.
I was hoping we could call it a clusterPod.
I'm not some wackjob who believes global warming doesn't exist, but this strikes me as a great money making endeavor. Hear me out.
1 - Buy lots of expensive computer equipment
2 - Write some software that models climate change, but adds a bit of extra warming each time
3 - Run simulations
4 - Release results.
5 - Clearly, more information is needed on climate change!
6 - Receive new grants. (aka Profit!)
7 - Increase fudge factor, repeat.
For bonus points, let the devices you use be so inefficient (iPhones? c'mon) that you don't even need to fudge your models - the carbon footprint of running the application itself increases global warming for you.
Can we end the tagging beta now that it's completely failed?
I'm so fucking tired of the media asserting as fact and perpetuating the myth of existence of the ipod.
This space available.
200 petaflops is, in fact, only 100 times what is available today:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
To get fast climate modelling, I'd suggest releasing a PS3 client using a backend similar to Folding@Home would be a good start. As more and more PS3s are sold, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that Folding@Home will get to 5 petaflops in the next couple of years.
How times change! This sounds a lot like an April 1 posting on codeproject.com. They claimed they were switching their site infrastructure over to a bunch of Windows CE devices. They even had some funny pictures to go along with the farce. Of course, this time the researchers are talking about using the chips not the pods.
Didn't Jack Kirby already think of this?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?