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ARM In Supercomputers — 'Get Ready For the Change'

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-and-what-ARMy dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Commodity ARM CPUs are poised to to replace x86 CPUs in modern supercomputers just as commodity x86 CPUs replaced vector CPUs in early supercomputers. An analysis by the EU Mountblanc Project (PDF) (using Nvidia Tegra 2/3, Samsung Exynos 5 & Intel Core i7 CPUs) highlights the suitability and energy efficiency of ARM-based solutions. They finish off by saying, 'Current limitations [are] due to target market condition — not real technological challenges. ... A whole set of ARM server chips is coming — solving most of the limitations identified.'"

2 of 238 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does it really matter? by symbolset · · Score: 5, Interesting

    These ARM cores are halfway between the extremely limited GPU cores and the extremely flexible X86 cores. They may be the "happy medium".

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. Questions... by storkus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As I understand it, Intel still has the advantage in the performance per watt category for general processing and GPUs have better performance per watt IF you can optimize for that specific environment--both things which have been commented to death endlessly by people far more knowledgeable than I.

    However, to me there are at least 3 questions unanswered:

    1. ASICs (and possibly FPGAs): Bitcoin miners and DES breakers are the best known examples. Where is the dividing line between where your operations are specific enough to emply an ASIC vs not specific enough and needing a GPU (or even CPU)? Could further optimization move this line more toward the ASIC?

    2. Huge dies: This has been talked about before, but it seems that, for applications that are embarrassingly parallel, this is clearly where the next revolution will be, with hundreds of cores (at least, and of whatever kind of "core" you want). So when will this stop being vaporware?

    3. But what do we do about all the NON-parallel jobs? If you can't apply an ASIC and you can't break it down, you're still stuck at the basic wall we've been at for around a decade now: where's Moore's (performance) law here? It would seem the only hope is new algorithms: TRUE computer science!