Ok, someone who actually knows what (s)he's talking about.
There's nothing special about this news other than the fact that the individual nodes are running linux. Which basically makes this an SP2 minus the superfast network (and the dent in the wallet).
The measuring stick for all computer hardware issues is application. There is supercomputing (vectorcomputing) (like Cray, traditionally) and there is parallel computing (like any old cluster of workstations). The distinction is the type of operation. In vectorcomputing, each node computes a very small part of the big picture, making communication time a very big (or small in this case) bottleneck. Thus these computers need super fast, specialized networking connections. There are many problems/programs which may be parallelized and yet, still have a significant sequential segment, causing the bulk of the processor cycles to be spent on processing, as opposed to waiting for data communication.
The problems described by the later are becoming more and more popular. Vector computing, however, is primarily core scientific applications (physics, math, weather prediction, etc.) which have not seen dramatic computational advances in the last decade.
An SP2 is sort of in the middle of the spectrum since on top of having high powered nodes, it has a fast network. A COW running linux catches the bottom end of this spectrum, it's nodes are high powered by its network is slow. With ethernet, fast ethernet, or ATM it could never match the performance of Crays or Connection Machines. But then what do you expect for $2000 a node.
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I concur.
(by the way, I bet I could probably piss further than you)
Ok, someone who actually knows what (s)he's talking about.
There's nothing special about this news other than the fact that the individual nodes are running linux. Which basically makes this an SP2 minus the superfast network (and the dent in the wallet).
The measuring stick for all computer hardware issues is application. There is supercomputing (vectorcomputing) (like Cray, traditionally) and there is parallel computing (like any old cluster of workstations). The distinction is the type of operation. In vectorcomputing, each node computes a very small part of the big picture, making communication time a very big (or small in this case) bottleneck. Thus these computers need super fast, specialized networking connections. There are many problems/programs which may be parallelized and yet, still have a significant sequential segment, causing the bulk of the processor cycles to be spent on processing, as opposed to waiting for data communication.
The problems described by the later are becoming more and more popular. Vector computing, however, is primarily core scientific applications (physics, math, weather prediction, etc.) which have not seen dramatic computational advances in the last decade.
An SP2 is sort of in the middle of the spectrum since on top of having high powered nodes, it has a fast network. A COW running linux catches the bottom end of this spectrum, it's nodes are high powered by its network is slow. With ethernet, fast ethernet, or ATM it could never match the performance of Crays or Connection Machines. But then what do you expect for $2000 a node.
Also