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."

Comments

Re:Oblig. misleading title

[TimCapulet]

Of course. iPods have nothing to do with this article at all. A less misleading title would be "Researcher Discusses Microprocessor Supercomputer". The word "iPod" is only there as an eye-catcher.

Re:It's about the bandwidth, not the MIPS

[pablomme]

That depends on the application. For embarrassingly-parallel tasks, such as some weather prediction methods, it's all about the processing power.

I do fairly-embarrassingly-parallel stochastic electronic structure simulations, and most of the time (except during set-up) I wouldn't care if the nodes were interconnected using dial-up modems. What matters in this case is having powerful and/or plentiful CPUs.

Riiight

[4D6963]

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.