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Tilera To Release 100-Core Processor
angry tapir writes "Tilera has announced new general-purpose CPUs, including a 100-core chip. The two-year-old startup's Tile-GX series of chips are targeted at servers and appliances that execute Web-related functions such as indexing, Web search and video search. The Gx100 100-core chip will draw close to 55 watts of power at maximum performance."
I can't wait to see the output of :
cat /proc/cpuinfo
I guess we will need to use:
cat /proc/cpuinfo | less
When we reach 1 million cores, we will need to rearrange the output of cat /proc/cpuinfo to eliminate redundant information ;-))
By the way I just typed "make menuconfig" and it wiil let you enter a number up to 512 in the "Maximum number of CPUs" field, so the Linux kernel seems ready for up to 512 CPUs (or cores, they are handled the same way by Linux it seems) as far I can tell by this simple test. Entering a number greater than 512 gives the "You have made an invalid entry" message ;-(
Note: You need to turn on "Support for big SMP systems with more than 8 CPUs" flag as well.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
It appears from the article that it's a new, separate architecture to which the kernel hasn't been ported yet, so these are add-on processors that can help reduce the load on the actual CPU, at least for now. So, em, two things: 1. How exactly does that work without kernel level support? They claimed having ported separate apps (MySQL, memcached, Apache), so this might suggest a generic kernel interface and userspace scheduling. 2. How does this fix the apps they ported being mostly IO bound in a lot of cases and 99% of the cores will still just be eating out of their noses?
Massive amounts or cores are cool and all that, but if the instruction set isn't any standard type (ie x86, Sparc, ARM, PowerPC or MIPS) chances are that it won't see light outside highly customized applications. Sure, Linux will probably run it. Linux run on anything, but it won't be put in a regular computer other than as an accelerator of some sort, like GPUs which are massively multicore too. Intel's Larrabee though..
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
it does if you are carefully starting applications in power of two and designing your applications to use power of two threads.
God's gift to chicks
SMP FAQ.
Q: Does the number of processors in a SMP system need to be a power of two/divisible by two?
A: No.
Q: Does the number of processors in a SMP system...
A: Any number of CPUs/cores that is larger than one will make the system an SMP system*.
(* except when it's an asymmetrical architecture)
Q: How do these patterns (power of 2, divisible by 2, etc) of numbers of cores affect performance?
A: Performance depends on the architecture of the system. You cannot judge by simply looking at the number of cores, just as you can't simply look at MHz.
Although I don't expect Apple to release an Apple Server edition with a Tilera multicore processor, I would be interested to see a version of FreeBSD running with Grand Central Dispatch on a Tilera multicore chip. It would give a good idea of how effective GCD would be in allocating cores for execution. Any machine with 100 cores must have a considerable amount of RAM, perhap 8GB+, even with large caches.
Apple has been very active in developing LLVM compilers, and has recently added CLANG front end, instead of GCC. I don't think apple has open sourced all their work yet, but check llvm.org for the current details. The real trick is breaking any algorithm into blocks. Using OpenCL to organize your code for execution. I mean how different is a 100 core multi-CPU chip from a multicore GPU accellerator!
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/snapshots/patch-2.6.27-rc2-git1.log
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Their plan is to eventually confuse consumers by advertising "X KiloCores! (* KC = 1000 cores)" when everyone expects a KiloCore to be 1024 cores.
sic transit gloria mundi
OK, so big disclaimer: I work for Sun (not Oracle, yet!)
The Sun Niagara T1 chip came out over 3 years ago, and it did 32 threads on 8 cores.
And drew something around 50W (200W for a fully-loaded server). And under $4k.
The T2 systems came out last year, do 64 threads/CPU for a similar power budget. And even less $/thread.
The T3 systems likely will be out next year (I don't know specifically when, I'm not In The Know), and the threads/chip should double again, with little power increase.
Of course, per-thread performance isn't equal to anything like a modern "standard" CPU. Though, it's now "good enough" for most stuff - the T2 systems have a per-thread performance equal to about the old Pentium3 chips. I would be flabbergasted if this GX chip had a per-core performance anywhere near that.
I'm not sure how Intel's Larabee is going to show (it's still nowhere near release), but the T-seres chips from Sun are cheap, open, and available now. And they run Solaris AND Linux. So unless this new GX chip is radically more efficient/higher-performance/less costly, I don't see this company making any impact.
-Erik
Unfortunately these days the meaning of supercomputer gets a bit diluted by many people calling clusters "supercomputers". They aren't really. As you noted what makes a supercomputer "super" isn't the number of processors, it is the rest, in particular the interconnects. Were this not the case, you could simply use cheaper clusters.
So why does it matter? Well, certain kinds of problems can't be solved by a cluster, just as certain ones can. To help understand how that might work, take something more people are familiar with like the difference between a cluster and just a bunch of computers on the Internet.
Some problems are extremely bandwidth non-intensive. They don't need no inter-node communication, and very little communication with the head node. A good example would be the Mersenne Prime Search, or Distributed.net. The problem is extremely small, the structure of the program is larger than the data itself. All the head node has to do is hand out ranges for clients to work on, and the clients only need to report the results, affirmative or negative. As such, it is something suited to work over the Internet. The nodes can be low bandwidth, they can drop out of communication for periods of time and it all works fine. Running on a cluster would gain you no speed over the same group of computers on modems.
However the same is not true for video rendering. You have a series of movie files you wish to composite in to a final production, with effects and so on. This sort of work is suited to a cluster. While the nodes can work independent, the work of one node doesn't depend on the others, they do require a lot of communication with the head node. The problem is very large, the video data can be terabytes. The result is also not small. So you can do it on many computers, but the bandwidth needs to be pretty high, with low latency. Gigabit Ethernet is likely what you are looking at. Trying to do it over the Internet, even broadband, would waste more time in data transfer than you'd gain in processing. You need a cluster.
Ok well supercomputers are the next level of that. What happens when you have a problem where you DO have a lot of inter-node communication? The result of the calculations on one node are influenced by the results on all others. This happens in things like physics simulations. In this case, a cluster can't handle it. You can slam your bandwidth but worse, you have too much latency. You spend all your time waiting on data, and thus computation speed isn't any faster.
For that, you need a supercomputer. You need something where nodes can directly access the memory of other nodes. It isn't quite as fast as local memory access, but nearly. Basically you want them to play like they are all the same physical system.
That's what separates a true supercomputer for a big cluster. You can have lots of CPUs and that's wonderful, there are a lot of problems you can solve on that. However that isn't a supercomputer unless the communication between nodes is there.
/proc/cpuinfo will become a small book. on the bright side, i guarantee 100 cores meets the draft requirements for 'windows 8 capable' status.
Good people go to bed earlier.