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

It's about the bandwidth, not the MIPS

[morcheeba]

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.

BlueGene/QCDOC vs this?

[Beale]

BlueGenes, and their predecessor, QCDOC supercomputers, already use slightly modified low-power embedded system chips. How is this any different?

Re:Oblig. misleading title

[Xiaran]

This makes me wonder... could a mobile phone company sell mesh/grid computing power? Lets say you have a special contract with the telco where for a cheaper plan they have the right to download data and crunch it when your phone is not in use.