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Mobile Phones vs. Supercomputers of the Past
An anonymous reader writes "The recently published Top 500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is based on the Linpack benchmark developed decades ago by Jack Dongarra. This same test has been ported to Android mobile phones, which means that we can compare the performance of our phones against that of the supercomputers of the past. For example, a tweaked Motorola Droid can hit 52 Mflop/s, which is more than 15 times faster than the CPUs used in the 1979 Cray-1." But even today's most powerful cellphones don't come with an integrated bench.
...make me kinda sad. On the one hand, I LOVE when I was born (1984). I'm old enough to remember a time without the Internet, without a PC in every home, and when cell phones were the size of briefcases...yet I'm still young enough to take advantage of technological innovations, keep up with advances, and appreciate the impact it has on our lives.
On the other hand, I wonder how much amazing stuff I would see had I been born even just 20 years later. In my lifetime I have already watched (for example) the NES as a state of the art system turn into the average gaming PC having a video card capable of over 1 teraflop worth of processing power. How much extra innovation and advancement would I see if I had STARTED with those 1+ teraflop cards?
"Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." -Kay
Living With a Nerd
So if I read this correctly, the point of this article is we should get a time machine so we can go back to the 70's and impress people with our smartphones?
See the problem here is that they won't have wifi or 3G coverage. All we'll be able to do is show those people of the ancient past Angry Bird and maybe one of those "pull-my-finger" apps. It just won't be all that impressive.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
It's sad. I was at the Computer Museum in Mountain View a few years ago, where they had a Cray-I in a corner of the lobby, just sitting there used as a bench. It's not even labeled; some visitors think it's just furniture.
...by our time machines and shaved privates.
For example, a tweaked Motorola Droid can hit 52 Mflop/s, which is more than 15 times faster than the CPUs used in the 1979 Cray-1.
"The Cray-1 had 12 pipelined functional units" and had "floating point performance generally about 136 MFLOPS. However, by using vector instructiosn carefully and building useful chains, the system could peak at 250 MFLOPS."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-1
Did they think they could run their website on a Droid too? Man it is slow.
I thought it was strange that the article author was reporting that a cray 1 only produced 3.4 mflops on linpack, which had a peak performance around 130 mflops. Looks like the author doesn't understand the benchmark very well.
If you look at the data quoted in the article, the n=100 result gives the Cray1 a score of either 3 or 12 mflops, depending on which entry you look at. There is no n=1000 result listed for the Cray 1, but one can expect, looking at the Cray XMP results, that it would be around 100, given the peak performance. The ETA10 would likely get a couple thousand mflops on linpack with n=1000.
The Cray 1 is more than a little dated. That said, if you look at supers from the early 90's, they still can do things that modern commodity hardware can't. As fast as a xeon or opteron is, it doesn't have 300Gbytes/second of memory bandwidth. Even late-80's supercomputers exceed desktops in some metrics, though probably not in raw ALU performance if the data all fits into L1 cache. The cost to run a desktop, however, is pretty compelling, and they don't leak freon when they run.
Not rendering bitty little colour screens or scanning for viruses. Plus the code was written to extract every last drop of power out of the architecture. So when you compare the amount of WORK a machine from the 70s or 80s did (my university's mainframe had a FORTRAN complier that needed less that 131kWord of memory - today the GRUB bootloader is bigger than that) with a more modern box, with all its overheads and inefficiencies, the balance isn't as great as the scoffers might think.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Cray's approach to supercomputing wasn't just to make the CPU fast. Indeed, he outcompeted faster CPUs by making all of his computers fast, so no power in the machine was wasted waiting for something else. Especially IO and memory were his focus for throughput. A Droid's CPU is bottlenecked by the rest of the device.
This unfair comparison isn't just whining about missing Cray's point. There's a lot of power in that Droid that the SW can't exploit, because its bottlenecks leave the fast parts waiting. Not only does that slow them down, but it wastes electrical energy. Which is the biggest problem in mobile devices.
LINPACK isn't the best way to measure supercomputers, and "nanocomputers" like mobile phones could be better if they learned something from Cray's research 40 years ago.
--
make install -not war
Today, the games you can play on your iPhone/Android or even the aging Nintendo DS have better graphics!! Resolution is a lot lower (not 3000x5000!) but at the screen size it certainly looks much better - and rendered in real time!
Remember this scene in hackers?
PHREAK: Yo. Check this out guys, this is insanely great, it's got a 28.8 BPS modem! ...
DADE: Yeah? Display?
CEREAL: Active matrix, man. A million psychedelic colors. Man, baby, sweet, ooo!
NIKON: I want it.
PHREAK: I want it to have my children!
KATE: What the hell are you doing?
DADE: It's cool, I'm just looking.
KATE: It's too much machine for you.
DADE: Yeah?
KATE: I hope you don't screw like you type.
DADE: It has a killer refresh rate.
KATE: P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
DADE: Yeah. It's not just the chip, it has a PCI bus. But you knew that.
KATE: Indeed. RISC architecture is gonna change everything.
DADE: Yeah. RISC is good.
Now, imagine all that excitement from the processing power and bandwidth they had even on a 28.8 modem - that we now have multiples of... in our pockets Where is it being leveraged for the goal for the good of man kind? Folding and SETI are good starts, but they haven; taken off. We've got tons of idle cycles... You'd figure there'd be some processing client where you get paid for your cycles, but it only exists as illegal botnets. Where's the open utility computing? Why don't my computers' idle cycles pay for themselves?
They were supposed to make our lives easier, but for as much as they empowered us, the exception processing got dumped on us. The nature of that work is different from the regular rhythmic routine of normal processing. Exceptions are urgent, require more effort and as a result are more stressful. And any news you get is when something is wrong.
I like the idea of being able to chat with people on the other side of the planet, but I haven't figured out what good it is to me. We don't have much in common with each other. I like the idea that I can do my own stock trading, but this usually means I lose money instead of my money manager. ;-p
Computers now cause as many problems as they solve (Goldman Sachs, AIG, I'm looking at you!) Is our society any better? Are people happier? Or are we more stressed out?
(And what has my /. commenting gotten me. Not a date or a dollar for sure!)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
"Great! A million miles from no-where and I'm stuck with a gungho igauna that tells me to *relax*.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When I started work as a computer programmer the Supercomputer of the time was the CDC6600 which had just taken the crown from the Ferranti Atlas.
When I took early retirement about 7 years ago, I often carried four devices which each needed about the power of the 6600 to function effectively:
A mobile phone
An MP3 player
A PDA (mainly used as an ebook reader)
A GPS (OK, I didn't carry this all that often)
A composer/researcher was using our University Mainframe (not quite that powerful) to produce music - his jobs typically ran for a whole 8 hour nightshift with an output of some 30 seconds of "music".
Having 15 Crays in you pocket never wooed a gal.
Having enough $ in your pocket to buy 15 Crays... That is another story.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?