If you check out their papers, they really have solved the parallel
programming problem. They've shown impressive speedup on such
impossible-to-parallelize algorithms as Matrix Multiply and Randomized
Quicksort....... oh wait, those are really easy to parallelize. Well,
maybe I can still get my desktop supercomputer so long as I want to
compute really, really big matrices on my desktop. Now the only trick
is finding a way to encode Quake as series of giant matrix
multiplies....
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/vishkin/XMT/spaa07 paper.pdf
Oh, and feel free to breeze over the part about no floating point
support. Everyone knows that the really hard programming problems
involve integer-only matrices.:-P
And just to throw one more fun fact in there, this thing lives in a
PCI slot (not even PCI-x), so getting data in and out of this thing is
going to take an obscene amount of time.
I don't want to bash it too much, but saying that this thing is a
desktop supercomputer capable of a 100x performance boost is pure BS. It's yet another example of a way to decelerate single-threaded applications while leaving the hard part of parallel programming and program partitioning up in the air. PRAM isn't really an answer to that.
The only reason this is getting any publicity is the $500 naming game.
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If you check out their papers, they really have solved the parallel programming problem. They've shown impressive speedup on such impossible-to-parallelize algorithms as Matrix Multiply and Randomized Quicksort....... oh wait, those are really easy to parallelize. Well, maybe I can still get my desktop supercomputer so long as I want to compute really, really big matrices on my desktop. Now the only trick is finding a way to encode Quake as series of giant matrix multiplies.... http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/users/vishkin/XMT/spaa07 paper.pdf
Oh, and feel free to breeze over the part about no floating point
support. Everyone knows that the really hard programming problems
involve integer-only matrices. :-P
And just to throw one more fun fact in there, this thing lives in a
PCI slot (not even PCI-x), so getting data in and out of this thing is
going to take an obscene amount of time.
I don't want to bash it too much, but saying that this thing is a
desktop supercomputer capable of a 100x performance boost is pure BS. It's yet another example of a way to decelerate single-threaded applications while leaving the hard part of parallel programming and program partitioning up in the air. PRAM isn't really an answer to that.
The only reason this is getting any publicity is the $500 naming game.