Scaling To a Million Cores and Beyond

mattaw writes "In my blog post I describe a system designed to test a route to the potential future of computing. What do we do when we have computers with 1 million cores? What about a billion? How about 100 billion? None of our current programming models or computer architecture models apply to machines of this complexity (and with their corresponding component failure rate and other scaling issues). The current model of coherent memory/identical time/everything can route to everywhere; it just can't scale to machines of this size. So the scientists at the University of Manchester (including Steve Furber, one of the ARM founders) and the University of Southampton turned to the brain for a new model. Our brains just don't work like any computers we currently make. Our brains have a lot more than 1 million processing elements (more like the 100 billion), all of which don't have any precise idea of time (vague ordering of events maybe) nor a shared memory; and not everything routes to everything else. But anyone who argues the brain isn't a pretty spiffy processing system ends up looking pretty silly. In effect, modern computing bears as much relation to biological computing as the ordered world of sudoku does to the statistical chaos of quantum mechanics.

Comments

Re:Better be running OSS

[capo_dei_capi]

This 1-million core machine better be running open source software and not proprietary software.

Yeah, especially if their software is licensed on a per-core basis.

The Internet

[pmontra]

The Internet is at least in the 1 billion cores range. The way to use many of them for a parallel computation has been demonstrated by Seti@home, Folding@home and even by botnets. They might not be the most efficient implementations when you have full control of the cores but they show the way to go when the availability of the cores and the communication between them is unreliable, when they have different times and different clocks and when they might be preempted to do different tasks.

Re:multi core design

[William Robinson]

Not sure where MISD is used

Back in 1987, when I was part of team that was designing parallel processing machine, with 4 neighboring CPUs sharing common memory (apart from their own local memory, kind of systolic array), we were designing machine suitable to simulate aerodynamics or weather forecasting using diffusion equations. We believed that it was working on MISD model, where different algorithms running in different CPUs utilized same data for analysis, using bus arbitration logic.